KNOWN UNKNOWNS:

UNCONVENTIONAL “STRATEGIC SHOCKS”

IN DEFENSE STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

Nathan Freier

November 2008

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forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War 

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The author would like to thank the following individuals 

and organizations for their significant contributions to this work. 

First, I am grateful to my colleagues at the Center for Strategic and 

International Studies, particularly Sam Brannen, Kathleen Hicks, 

Clark Murdock, and Christine Wormuth. Our interaction over the 

summer was decisive in clarifying my thoughts. Next, I would like 

to thank Mr. D. Burgess Laird of the Institute for Defense Analysis 

for encouraging me to write this monograph in the first place and 

providing important advice at the front end of the project. I am also 

grateful to Dr. Phil Williams both of the University of Pittsburgh 

and the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. Dr. 

Williams’ advice and precision editing were instrumental in the 

project’s completion. I am further grateful for the contributions 

of Dr. Carl van Dyke of the National Intelligence Council. His 

input was instrumental in strengthening my final arguments. 

As always, I am also beholden to the other authors cited in this 

work. And, finally, this monograph would not have been possible 

without support from the U.S. Army War College’s Peacekeeping 

and Stability Operations Institute. Their provision of a hospitable 

venue for research and writing made this work and future like 

works possible.

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iii

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ISBN 1-58487-368-X

v

FOREWORD

This timely PKSOI Paper on unconventional 

strategic shock provides the defense policy team a clear 

warning against excessive adherence to past defense 

and national security convention. Including the insights 

of a number of noted scholars on the subjects of “wild 

cards” and “strategic surprise,” the author, Nathan 

Freier, argues that future disruptive, unconventional 

shocks are inevitable. Through strategic impact and 

potential for disruption and violence, defense-relevant 

unconventional shocks, in spite of their nonmilitary 

character, will demand the focused attention of defense 

leadership, as well as the decisive employment of 

defense capabilities in response. As a consequence, Mr. 

Freier makes a solid case for continued commitment 

by the Department of Defense to prudent strategic 

hedging against their potential occurrence.

The Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute 

and the Strategic Studies Institute are pleased to offer 

this insightful monograph as a contribution to the 

debate on this important national security issue.

JOHN A. KARDOS

Colonel, U.S. Army

Director

Peacekeeping and Stability

Operations Institute

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute 
vi

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

NATHAN FREIER is a Visiting Professor of Strategy, Policy, 

and Risk Assessment at the U.S. Army’s Peacekeeping and 

Stability Operations Institute and a Senior Fellow in the 

International Security Program at the Center for Strategic 

and International Studies (CSIS). Mr. Freier joined CSIS in 

April 2008 after retiring from the U.S. Army after 20 years 

as a lieutenant colonel. His last military assignment was 

as Director of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Army 

War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. Prior to that, he 

served in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of 

Defense for Strategy, where his principal responsibilities 

included development of the 2005 National Defense 

Strategy. Previously, he was an Army fellow/visiting 

scholar at the University of Maryland’s Center for 

International and Security Studies and a strategist with 

the Strategy, Plans, Concepts, and Doctrine Directorate, 

Department of the Army Staff in Washington, DC. Mr. 

Freier twice deployed to Iraq as a strategist while assigned 

to the Army War College. From January to July 2005, he 

served in the Strategy, Plans, and Assessments Directorate 

of Headquarters, Multi-National Force–Iraq, and from 

May to August 2007, he served as a special assistant 

to the Commander, Multi-National Corps–Iraq, in the 

Commander’s Initiatives Group. In his current capacity, 

he continues to provide expert advice to a number of 

key actors in the security and defense policymaking and 

analysis communities. Among his research interests and 

areas of expertise are U.S. grand strategy; national security, 

defense, and military strategy and policy development; 

irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid security challenges 

and conflicts; strategic net and risk assessment; terrorism; 

and the Iraq War. Mr. Freier holds masters’ degrees in 

International Relations from Troy State University and 

Politics from The Catholic University of America.
vii

SUMMARY

The current defense team confronted a gamechanging “strategic shock” in its first 8 months in 

office. The next team would be well-advised to expect 

the same. Defense-relevant strategic shocks jolt 

convention to such an extent that they force sudden, 

unanticipated change in the Department of Defense’s 

(DoD) perceptions about threat, vulnerability, and 

strategic response. Their unanticipated onset forces the 

entire defense enterprise to reorient and restructure 

institutions, employ capabilities in unexpected ways, 

and confront challenges that are fundamentally 

different than those routinely considered in defense 

calculations. 

The likeliest and most dangerous future shocks 

will be unconventional. They will not emerge from 

thunderbolt advances in an opponent’s military 

capabilities. Rather, they will manifest themselves in 

ways far outside established defense convention. Most 

will be nonmilitary in origin and character, and not, 

by definition, defense-specific events conducive to the 

conventional employment of the DoD enterprise. 

They will rise from an analytical no man’s land 

separating well-considered, stock and trade defense 

contingencies and pure defense speculation. Their 

origin is most likely to be in irregular, catastrophic, and 

hybrid threats of “purpose” (emerging from hostile 

design) or threats of “context” (emerging in the absence 

of hostile purpose or design). Of the two, the latter is 

both the least understood and the most dangerous. 

Thoughtful evaluation of defense-relevant strategic 

shocks and their deliberate integration into DoD 

strategy and planning is a key check against excessive 

convention. Further, it underwrites DoD relevance 
viii

and resilience. Prior anticipation of September 11, 

2001 (9/11) or the Iraq insurgency, for example, might 

have limited the scope and impact of the shock. In 

both instances, wrenching periods of post-event selfexamination did help solve our current or last problem. 

They may not have been as effective in solving our next 

one. 

DoD is now doing valuable work on strategic 

shocks. This work must endure and mature through 

the upcoming political transition. The next defense 

team should scan the myriad waypoints and end points 

along dangerous trend lines, as well as the prospect for 

sudden, discontinuous breaks in trends altogether to 

identify the next shock or shocks. Doing so is a prudent 

hedge against an uncertain and dangerous future.
1

KNOWN UNKNOWNS:1

UNCONVENTIONAL “STRATEGIC SHOCKS”

 IN DEFENSE STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT

INTRODUCTION: THE FAILURE OF 

IMAGINATION2

A thoughtful senior policy official has opined that most 

potentially devastating threats to U.S. interests start 

being evaluated as unlikely.

Jack Davis3

Defense analysis and strategy are inherently 

reactive. Historically, defense strategy development 

and planning have demonstrated three critical flaws. 

For too long, they have been overly reactive. Corporately, 

they have lacked sufficient imagination. And, as a result, 

both have been vulnerable to surprise. 

Recent history indicates that defense strategy and 

planning fail to be sufficiently predictive. When they 

do venture into prediction, it often comes as linear 

extrapolation of contemporary challenges, adhering 

too closely to current convention. These are artifacts of 

defense conservatism, finite resources, and Bureaucracy 

101. 

Senior defense and military leadership naturally err 

on the side of what is known and practiced at the expense 

of preparing for what is less well-known but perhaps 

more dangerous. There is an inherent predilection 

against anything that smacks of speculation. This 

trend is natural and narrowly reasonable. Cautious 

senior leaders see too much at stake in the near-term 

to countenance instituting disruptive institutional 

change that is predicated on predictive analysis. In 

their view, there are enough compelling challenges in 
2

the Department of Defense’s (DoD) in-box to consume 

the focus of senior leaders and strategists. Yet, in the 

contemporary environment, focusing exclusively on 

the known, practiced, and narrowly reasonable is 

also naïve. At this juncture, engaging in some sound 

speculation is increasingly prudent. 

Like the attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), the 

subsequent War on Terrorism (WoT), and the Iraq 

insurgency, the next defense-relevant challenge is likely 

to be a strategically dislocating surprise.4

 Without 

continued and more sophisticated “horizon scanning,” 

there is near-certainty that the next compelling defenserelevant challenge will be a “strategic shock.”5

 The 

current administration confronted a game-changing 

“strategic shock” inside its first 8 months in office. The 

next administration would be well-advised to expect 

the same during the course of its first term.6

Strategic shocks jolt convention to such an extent 

that they force affected institutions to fundamentally 

reorient strategy, strategic investments, and missions. 

DoD’s post-9/11 adjustment to counterterrorism (CT) 

and counterinsurgency (COIN) illustrates this point. 

Some of DoD’s reorientation on CT and COIN was 

prudent and necessary, but also, at the same time, 

late and reactive. Without comprehensive net and risk 

assessment of future shocks, any defense adjustment 

based on yesterday’s experience but nonetheless 

intended for tomorrow’s unconventional demands 

could prove far off the mark downstream. 

 Senior defense leaders and strategists have key 

questions to answer on the subject of strategic shocks.

This monograph examines the role of the strategic 

shock in contemporary defense strategy development. 

It targets the incoming senior defense team, seeking 

to encourage them to institutionalize defense-relevant 
3

shocks in long-range defense strategy and planning 

efforts. It attempts to begin answering four important 

questions on the subject: (1) What are strategic shocks? 

(2) What obstacles militate against their routine 

employment in DoD strategy development? (3) 

Why are strategic shocks important to strategy and 

planning? And, finally, (4) What kinds of shocks would 

profoundly impact future DoD decisionmaking? 

Meaningful consideration of shocks in strategy 

development and planning would better posture DoD 

for an unconventional future. The contemporary 

environment is inherently complex. It will remain 

so. The likeliest and most dangerous security 

challenges emerging from it will be unconventional. 

“Unconventional,” from a DoD perspective, connotes 

national security conditions and contingencies that are 

defense-relevant but not necessarily defense-specific. 

Unconventional security challenges lie substantially 

outside the realm of traditional warfighting. They 

are routinely nonmilitary in origin and character.7 Yet, 

nonmilitary, in this context, does not necessarily mean 

nonviolent, nonstate, or disordered and unorganized.8 

This monograph argues that thoughtful evaluation 

of the most plausible defense-relevant shocks and their 

deliberate integration into DoD strategy and planning 

provides senior defense officials with key checks on 

excessive convention. Further, the institutionalization 

of deliberate net and risk assessment of defense-relevant 

shocks, reasoned judgments about their origins, and 

preliminary analysis of the most appropriate responses 

to them promises to routinize prudent hedging in 

DoD strategy and planning. Finally, serial assessment 

of potential shocks underwrites DoD relevance and 

resilience in an increasingly unconventional strategic 

environment. The most recent National Defense 
4

Strategy (NDS) captures this idea when it observes: 

“The [Department of Defense] should also develop 

the military capability and capacity to hedge against 

uncertainty, and the institutional agility and flexibility 

to plan early and respond effectively alongside 

interdepartmental, nongovernmental and international 

partners.”9

The Department of Defense is doing valuable work 

on strategic shocks. That work must endure and mature 

through the upcoming political transition. DoD has 

initiated an embryonic effort on “strategic trends and 

shocks.”10 In a critical period of political transition, it 

might lose momentum with the inevitable change in 

defense leadership. This would be unfortunate. The 

new Secretary of Defense and his or her team must 

continue to build on the work done thus far. Careful 

examination of the most plausible and disruptive 

strategic shocks should be routine in all future defense 

strategy, planning, and decisionmaking.

“KNOWN UNKNOWNS”: PREDICTABLE BUT 

UNPREDICTED STRATEGIC SHOCKS11

(T)here are some risks to national security which . . . 

can be conceived, but not predicted or fully anticipated. 

Because they cannot be anticipated, such events are 

very difficult to plan for effectively. At least two reasons 

apply. First, by their very nature, these events alter the 

international system by their reversal of significant 

trends, thereby undermining the facts upon which 

future planning is built. Second, many of these events 

fall outside the scope of traditional or permitted defense 

planning.

— Sam J. Tangredi12
5

Strategic shocks change the nature of “the game” 

itself. To Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, strategic 

shocks (or “strategic surprises” in their lexicon) are 

“game changing events.”13 Their occurrence suddenly 

discredits many or all preexisting assumptions about 

the environment and those conventions that govern 

effective navigation through it. Schwartz and Randall 

conclude: 

Strategic surprises . . . are those . . . events that, if they 

occur, would make a big difference to the future, force 

decisionmakers to challenge their own assumptions of 

how the world works, and require hard choices today.14

Schwartz and Randall distinguish strategic shocks 

or surprises from other contingencies. They argue 

that they (1) “have an important impact on . . . [the] 

country”; (2) stretch conventional wisdom in ways that 

make “it difficult to convince others that the surprise is 

even possible”; and, finally, (3) are so complex that it is 

“hard to imagine what can be done in response.”15

Employing the term “wild card,” John L. Peterson 

defines strategic shocks as those events that have “a 

direct effect on the human condition”; have “broad, 

important and sometimes fundamental implications”; 

and finally, rise and mature “so fast that there is not 

enough warning to allow the rest of the system to 

adjust.”16 Thus, game-changing strategic shocks catch 

national security institutions like DoD by surprise by 

the speed of their onset, as well as by the breath and 

depth of their impact. Strategic shocks suddenly and 

irrevocably change the rules of the game, as well as the 

contours and composition of playing surface itself. 

In a defense context, strategic shocks manifest 

themselves as sudden surprises to DoD’s collective 

consciousness. They pose grave risks—perhaps even 

lasting and irreversible harm—to one or more core 
6

security interests. Defense-relevant shocks force 

sudden, unanticipated change in DoD’s perceptions 

about threat, vulnerability, and strategic response. Their 

unexpected onset forces the whole defense enterprise 

to rapidly reorient and restructure institutions and 

employ institutional and operational capabilities in 

fundamentally different ways, against fundamentally 

different challenges. 

Some of the most plausible defense-relevant strategic shocks remain low probability events. Nonetheless, their impact is so fundamental and consequential 

that hedging against them is a critical activity for the 

entire defense enterprise. Again, the post-9/11 period 

is a clinic in this regard.

Defense-relevant strategic shocks present senior 

leaders and strategists with complex conceptual 

challenges. Defense-relevant strategic shocks are thunderbolt events. Absent prior consideration, strategic 

shocks catch senior defense leaders and strategists flatfooted. They are so strategically dislocating that they 

cause sudden defense adaptation to new, unfamiliar 

rule sets or the absence of rules altogether. Defense 

leaders and strategists are forced by circumstances to 

make snap judgments on the future efficacy of standing 

defense paradigms—all under the pressure of time and 

rapidly changing circumstances. As a consequence, 

responses to them are vulnerable to having hope and 

chance versus prudent risk-informed planning as their 

foundations. 

Taking some exception with Tangredi’s observation 

above, they are at once both predictable (and often 

predicted) but also un- or inadequately anticipated and 

accounted for.17 According to a 2007 Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) report, “In hindsight, it is clear that 

most shocks are the product of long-term trends, and are 
7

less disruptive when we have anticipated and responded to [the underlying trends].”18 In this regard, strategic shocks are less failures in prediction and instead 

key failures by the strategy and policy community to 

thoughtfully account for them adequately in strategic 

planning.

Shocks do, as Tangredi suggests, undermine 

prevailing strategy and planning assumptions.19

And thus, they also often lie outside “traditional 

or permitted” areas of defense inquiry. As a result, 

they so jar prevailing defense wisdom that they force 

fundamental changes to some or all long-standing 

defense priorities. The NPS report observes similarly, 

“Shocks are disruptive by their very nature and . . . can 

change how we think about security and the role of the 

military.”20 Thus, strategic shocks force defense leaders 

into uncharted operating space. Witness, for example, 

the unplanned renaissance of CT, COIN, and stability 

operations within the DoD repertoire. 

“Shock” and “surprise” are not necessarily synonymous. Surprise is only half of the equation with 

respect to defense-relevant shocks. They are distinct 

from other unexpected strategic contingency events in 

that they are unanticipated and inadequately accounted 

for to such an extent that their occurrence triggers 

fundamental strategic and institutional disruption 

across the defense enterprise. There is no scientific 

break point between strategic shock and strategic 

surprise. The boundary separating the two is a function 

of an event’s strategic impact, the extent of disruption it 

causes, and the degree to which the defense enterprise 

anticipated its occurrence in strategy development and 

planning. High impact contingency events that promise 

fundamental disruption and occur without the benefit 

of adequate policy-level anticipation are more likely 

than not to be strategic shocks (see Figure 1). 
8

Figure 1. Defense-Relevant Strategic Shock Versus 

Strategic Surprise.

Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was 

a strategic surprise. It was not a strategic shock. Both 

the challenge from Iraq’s military and the American 

response to large-scale conventional cross-border 

incursion were well-considered in both theory and 

practice. There was no need for a fundamental 

reorientation of defense strategy and defense priorities 

in response. 

On the other hand, 9/11-like attacks were not 

necessarily unpredicted, but they were nonetheless 

shocking to the national security establishment. 

Against a wide universe of compelling defense-relevant 

challenges, 9/11-like events and the likeliest American 

response to them were both inadequately considered 

and undervalued in defense planning. Thus, when they 

became reality, they proved to be disruptive shocks to 

the collective defense consciousness. The surprising 
9

speed and breadth of change in U.S. perceptions 

about the threat from terrorism forced an institutional 

revolution on DoD without the benefit of detailed 

forethought. 

In 1962, Thomas Schelling captured the essence of 

the defense-relevant strategic shock, in the foreword 

to Roberta Wohlstetter’s classic book Pearl Harbor: 

Warning and Decision, when he observed on the Pearl 

Harbor attacks: 

The results, at Pearl Harbor, were sudden, concentrated, 

and dramatic. The failure, however, was cumulative, 

widespread, and rather drearily familiar . . . (S)urprise 

is everything involved in a government’s . . . failure to 

anticipate effectively.21

There are two routes to defense-relevant shock.

Strategic shocks will arrive via one of two distinct paths. 

The first is rapid, unanticipated arrival at the natural 

end of a well-recognized and perilous trend line; or, as 

a corollary, earlier than expected arrival at a dangerous 

waypoint along that same trend line.22 Both indicate 

some substantial and largely unforeseen escalation 

of recognized hazards. Alternatively, they may arrive 

via less predictable, discontinuous breaks from trends 

altogether.23 These are the rarer “Black Swans.”24 9/11 

might be considered the former. And, although the 

subject of some debate about its predictability, the 

sudden collapse of the Soviet Union might fall in the 

latter category. 

This view is consistent with DoD’s current 

perspective on strategic shocks. DoD policymakers 

define shocks as sudden arrival of exigent conditions 

“that [punctuate] the evolution of a trend—a 

discontinuity that either rapidly accelerates [the 

trend’s] pace or significantly changes its trajectory.”25
10

The first of these discontinuities implies unanticipated 

arrival at a way- or endpoint on a recognized trend line. 

The second reflects sudden onset of the rarer “Black 

Swan.” On the subject of “strategic trends,” the most 

recent defense strategy observes:

Increasingly, the Department will have to plan for a 

future security environment shaped by the interaction of 

powerful strategic trends. These trends suggest a range 

of plausible futures, some presenting major challenges 

and security risks.26

Shocks emerge from strategic planning territory that 

Hugh Courtney describes as “Level 3” and “Level 4” 

uncertainty. Courtney’s upper two levels of uncertainty 

are also consistent with the discussion above. According to Courtney, “Level 3” uncertainty is territory 

where “(o)ne can identify the range of possible future 

outcomes, but no obvious point forecast emerges.”27

This range of outcomes is akin to the end- and/or way 

points on known and dangerous trend lines. “Level 4” 

uncertainty represents decisionmaking territory where 

“a limitless range of possible future outcomes” exists.28

This is the territory of the “Black Swan”—discontinuous breaks in trend lines altogether.

Unconventional, defense-relevant shocks lie in 

the conceptual territory between the well-considered 

and the purely speculative. In defense strategy and 

planning, meaningful consideration of shocks is uncovered, informally-covered, or inadequately-covered ground. Indeed, in spite of nascent work within 

the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), shocks 

largely lay in an analytical no man’s land separating 

conventional contingency events from highly incredible 

or speculative ones. The uncovered ground in between 

becomes fertile soil for the next shock. 
11

On one side of the no man’s land is the well-practiced 

trade of DoD. It is territory occupied by conventional 

military competition and now kinetic CT and COIN. 

Until 9/11, DoD over-subscribed to the first. Since the 

Iraq War, it hazards over-optimizing for the second. 

On the other side of the divide is an incredible 

or highly speculative extreme that pushes at the farboundary of defense rationality. Up to a reasonable 

point, some of this area might still be the target of 

prudent hedging. However, beyond the point of 

reason, it becomes a resource consuming distraction. In 

contemporary defense parlance, this area is exemplified 

in what the author might call the extreme “disruptive 

challenge” where the U.S. military might find itself 

suddenly powerless against the technical advances 

of a capable state opponent with little or no strategic 

warning.29 Figure 2 provides a graphic representation 

of the two extremes and the analytical no man’s land 

between. 

Figure 2. No Man’s Land—“The Gap.”
12

9/11 rose from the middle of “no man’s land.” An 

illustration is in order here. Prior to 9/11, terrorism was 

plainly on the defense and national security agenda. 

There was a clear trend line of increasing terrorist 

violence and lethality—e.g., 1993 World Trade Center 

bombings, 1998 East African bombings, the USS Cole. 

“Run-of-the-mill” terrorism was deemed nettlesome 

but strategically inconsequential. It was “white noise” 

perpetrated by what some thought to be an unimportant 

and largely discredited extremist constituency. At the 

far end of the same spectrum, defense and national 

security strategists considered nuclear terrorism to be 

catastrophic, unthinkable, and thus worthy of some 

defense focus. 

There was little meaningful defense consideration 

of the severity and consequences of terrorism lying 

on the strategic ground in between. However, in 

hindsight, one can see that 9/11 marked the U.S. 

arrival at a natural, dangerous, and underappreciated 

waypoint on an already recognized trend line. It was a 

thunderbolt from the middle of the analytical no man’s 

land separating the conventional from the extreme. 

The gap between the conventional and wellconsidered and the incredible or highly speculative 

should be a priority in future defense analysis.

Detailed net and risk assessment between the two 

extremes is increasingly important to defense strategy 

and planning. This territory skirts the inside edges 

of well-considered, defense-relevant, and defensespecific conditions and truly incredible or extreme 

ones. Admittedly, the boundary demarking the latter 

is highly subjective. Nonetheless, this middle area 

has long been undervalued in mainstream defense 

planning. Here a caution from Thomas Schelling is 

appropriate. He observes:
13

The danger is not that we shall read the signals and 

indicators with too little skill, the danger is in a poverty 

of expectations—a routine obsession with a few dangers 

that may be familiar rather than likely.30

The gap in the middle is that unconventional

ground where irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid 

“threats of purpose” and “threats of context” rise 

and mix in complex combinations to challenge core 

interests.31 Purposeful threats are defense-specific or 

defense-relevant security challenges originating in the 

hostile designs of a consequential opponent. Threats 

of context are defense-relevant security challenges 

emerging slowly or suddenly from circumstances 

endemic to the strategic environment itself; all in the 

absence of hostile design vis-à-vis the United States.32

This middle gap—where threats of purpose and 

context rise and combine—is the likeliest source 

of strategic shock for the nation and its defense 

establishment. Increased focus here may catch the 

next disruptive surprise early. Thus, it is increasingly 

important for senior leaders and strategists to examine 

all plausible waypoints and endpoints along the full 

length of unfavorable trend lines, as well as credible, 

discontinuous breaks in the trend lines themselves. Both 

should be done with a view toward hedging against 

unforeseen shock. Hugh Courtney is instructive in this 

regard. He observes:

Scenarios that describe the extreme points in the range of 

possible outcomes are often relatively easy to develop, 

but those in between deliver the most information for 

current strategic decisions and they are the hardest to 

determine.33
14

The most compelling future defense-relevant shocks 

are likely to be unconventional. Future Secretaries of 

Defense should recognize that the next defense-relevant 

shock will likely emerge as a significant surprise to the 

innately conservative and traditionally-focused DoD 

establishment. It will be strategically dislocating. It is 

certain to fall substantially outside established defense 

convention. And, if left unaccounted for in DoD 

strategy development and planning, it will vex senior 

leaders and strategists. 

Indeed, the odds are very high against any of the 

challenges routinely at the top of the traditional defense 

agenda triggering the next watershed inside DoD. 

Here it might be valuable to recognize that current 

defense convention itself may be less a reflection of 

strategic reality than commonly appreciated.34 In this 

regard, the next exigent challenge for DoD is not likely 

to emerge from deliberate, cross border attack by an 

aggressive state. Nor, is it likely to arrive via sudden 

missile attack on an American or allied population. 

Finally, neither will it likely come from an organized 

insurgency against a friendly government. These are 

all now the stock and trade of defense convention, 

yet probably fail to adequately represent the likeliest 

defense-specific and defense-relevant realities. Figure 

3 below suggests that the contemporary defense reality 

may already straddle the far extreme of current defense 

convention, as well as significant uncovered ground in 

“the gap.” 
15

Figure 3. Current Reality May Defy Current 

Convention.

In this respect, the next compelling defenserelevant threat is likely to appear by purpose and 

design or accident at the intersection of war of some 

description,35 low politics, and chronic instability. It will 

fall in between the conventional decision and operating 

space of competing U.S. Government (USG) agencies. 

It will not lend itself to simple resolution through the 

traditional application of U.S. instruments of power in 

their classical combinations. As in the case of both 9/11 

and the Iraq insurgency, the next consequential shock 

for DoD is certain to be unconventional and defenserelevant, not traditional and defense-specific.36

Among the most challenging defense-relevant 

shocks will be those arising in the absence of hostile 

strategic design.37 Defense leaders and strategists 

should be acutely aware that both hostile purpose 

and strategic context are combining to undermine and 

threaten core interests. As senior leaders and strategists 

weigh the hazards of both, they should recognize that 

looking for the next shock solely in the hostile designs of 

adversaries is grossly inadequate. Indeed, the strategic 

environment itself may be the next worst U.S. enemy. 
16

Even shocks born of hostile purpose will look 

different than current convention allows. Indeed, future 

purposeful shocks are likeliest to come when state and 

nonstate competitors learn to effectively circumvent 

traditional U.S. military overmatch, employing nonmilitary means as war. They will leverage politics, 

economics, hostile social action, and discriminating 

nonmilitary violence in innovative combinations. As 

a result, traditional U.S. military advantages will be 

sidelined not by breakthrough military technology or 

concepts, but by the simple absence of a legitimate casus 

belli. These circumstances should be less “shocking,” 

as there is still some latent convention to the prospect 

of purposeful opponents leveraging nonmilitary 

innovation as war. Nonetheless, the current defense 

strategy does recognize the potential for shock in this 

regard when it observes:

In some instances, we may not learn that a conflict is 

underway until it is well-advanced and our options 

are limited. We must develop better intelligence 

capabilities to detect, recognize, and analyze new forms 

of warfare.38

The most challenging defense-relevant shocks 

might emerge from adverse conditions endemic to 

the environment itself. This is made more certain by 

the unguided forces of globalization, toxic populism, 

identity politics, underdevelopment, human/natural 

disaster, and disease. In the end, shocks emerging from 

contextual threats might challenge core U.S. interests 

more fundamentally than any number of prospective 

purposeful shocks. This is especially true given the 

degree to which threats of context remain unconsidered 

or, at a minimum, undervalued in contemporary defense planning and decisionmaking. In the main, 
17

threats of context are difficult for the defense establishment to anticipate and combat precisely because:

• There is no single engine or design behind their 

occurrence;

• They are more out of the proximate control of the 

United States and its most capable international 

partners;

• They are much harder to predict and/or track; 

and finally,

• They are in- or undervulnerable to traditional 

instruments of U.S. power applied in predictable 

combinations.

Threats of context might include but are not limited 

to contagious un- and under-governance; civil violence; 

the swift catastrophic onset of consequential natural, 

environmental, and/or human disaster; a rapidly 

expanding and uncontrolled transregional epidemic; 

and the sudden crippling instability or collapse of 

a large and important state. Indeed, pushing at the 

boundaries of current convention, it would be prudent 

to add catastrophic dislocation inside the United States 

or homegrown domestic civil disorder and/or violence 

to this category as well. The 2008 NDS observes 

similarly:

Over the next 20 years physical pressures—population, 

resource, energy, climatic, and environmental—could 

combine with rapid social, cultural, technological, and 

geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty.39

Most of these contextual threats are triggers or 

catalysts. They are the origin of shocks. The extent of 

the shock is determined by the degree to which any one 

of these threats is unanticipated or unaccounted for by 

the strategy and policy community and, as a result, 
18

forces revolutionary change on the defense or national 

security status quo. For example, disruptive civil 

violence, natural disasters, and epidemics are expected 

on the near- to mid-term strategic horizon. They will 

occur around the world. The defense-relevant shock 

comes when one of these occurs or two or more of these 

combine in ways that force DoD to fundamentally 

reorient strategy, capabilities, investments, and concepts in response. 

By way of example, realist calculation indicates 

that epidemics and widespread civil violence might 

be tolerable in some parts of the world. Shock would 

result if these occurred inside the United States or 

inside a key strategic partner to such an extent that they 

forced DoD to radically re-role for domestic security, 

population control, consequence management, and 

stabilization. Likewise, failure of any state is tragic, but 

not always compelling strategically. However, failure 

of one or more nuclear states and subsequent nuclear 

use by competing parties in an intrastate war or nuclear 

use externally against the United States or a key U.S. 

ally might force DoD to fundamentally retool for 

stabilization in a “dirty” environment, and, at the same 

time, increase its capacity for the armed restoration of 

responsible control over third party nuclear arsenals.40

TRAPPED BY CONVENTION: SEEING 

THE FUTURE WE WANT?

There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the 

unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we 

have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks 

strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need 

not be considered seriously

—Thomas Schelling41
19

Defense strategy and planning are trapped by 

excessive convention. DoD has begun to explore 

strategic shocks in a more thoughtful way. In the past, 

however, meaningful consideration of strategic shocks 

was never welcome in mainstream defense strategy and 

policy development. The past might be prologue in this 

regard. Until quite recently, meaningful examination 

of shocks was relegated to the niche worlds of defense 

futures, concept development, and net assessment. 

These defense-specific communities, however, limited 

consideration of shocks to examination of linear 

or discontinuous changes in the quality of known 

military threats.42 Until the predictable shock of 9/11, 

mainstream defense strategists rarely ventured into 

the territory of unconventional strategic shocks in 

other than a cursory and speculative manner. In the 

words of the 9/11 Commission, “Imagination is not a 

gift usually associated with bureaucracies.”43

In general, rigorously analyzed strategic shocks 

were never injected thoughtfully into important 

pieces of high-level defense guidance—e.g., successive 

National Military Strategies, Quadrennial Defense 

Reviews, and biennial Defense Planning Guidance. 

When strategic shocks or wild cards were mentioned 

in these, they were often described in overly broad 

terms and were most often captured in “throw away” 

language like that from the 1997 National Military 

Strategy (NMS):

We can never know with certainty where or when the 

next conflict will occur, who our next adversary will be, 

how an enemy will fight, who will join us in a coalition, 

or precisely what demands will be placed on U.S. forces. 

A number of “wild card” threats could emerge. . . . Such 

threats range from the emergence of new technologies 

. . . to the loss of key allies or alliances and the unexpected 

overthrow of friendly regimes.44
20

Thus, to date, successive Secretaries of Defense 

have been disinclined to account for shocks in their 

strategic calculations. There is a predictable and 

natural sensitivity within the defense establishment 

against veering too far in the direction of speculation. 

Likewise, innate military conservatism has consistently 

forced senior leaders and strategists into the sanctuary 

of convention. Powerful motivations militate against 

gambling finite resources or targeting DoD strategy 

toward worldviews deviating dramatically from established defense norms. Francis Fukuyama suggests 

this is the product of behaviors bred inside the national 

security bureaucracy. He observes:

Those who deal professionally with global politics, 

foreign policy, and national security affairs have 

particular biases when it comes to thinking about the 

future. Their biases generate a perceptual incentive 

structure that throws off their general capacity for 

accurate prediction.45

Summarizing the arguments presented in his 

recent edited volume on strategic shocks and wild 

cards, Fukuyama concludes that failures of cognition, 

resources, and institutional weaknesses all contribute 

to the widespread tendency to leave strategic shocks 

out of deliberate strategic planning.46 On the issue of 

“human cognition,” he decries the dangers resident in 

“shared mental models” that result in group think. He 

observes more generally, “(L)eaders have a hard time 

discounting the present value of events that will take 

place in the future.”47

With respect to resources, he argues, “Even if 

individuals . . . are cognitively prepared for a future 

contingency, they often do not have the right incentives 

to hedge against it properly.” He continues, “Hedging 
21

is costly, and no organization can possibly hedge 

against all possible contingencies.”48 Finally, on the 

issue of institutions, Fukuyama suggests, “Hedging 

against future risks . . . also requires collective action, 

specifically a sharing of decisionmaking authority 

and a pooling of resources across organizational and 

international boundaries.”49 The implication is that the 

capacity for shared responsibility and collective action 

are rare qualities inside the U.S. national security and 

defense establishments. 

DoD’s prevailing, pre-9/11 “mental model” biased 

it in the direction of excessive convention. All of the 

aforementioned were evidenced in the behaviors 

of pre-9/11 DoD. The mental model operative in 

DoD prior to 9/11 rested on the 60 (plus)-year-old 

theology of industrial and information-age military 

conflict. The role of DoD was to “fight and win wars.” 

“Wars” by definition were limited to the formal clash 

of arms between the United States and hostile state 

competitors. Defense strategy and planning were 

driven by linear extrapolations of existing or perceived 

sources of future military conflict—resurgent Russia, 

rising China, recalcitrant Iraq, miscalculating North 

Korea. There would be future security challenges. The 

only difference between the Cold War and the postCold War epoch was quantity—cumulatively more 

consequential challengers; and quality—a universe of 

threats that were dangerous but not so existentially. 

In this mental frame, the only threats of consequence 

were states; specifically, state militaries. Among these, 

the sources of strategic shock were thought to be those 

that might have the potential for sudden unanticipated 

acquisition and employment of new, more threatening 

(“disruptive”) military capabilities or designs. There 

would, for example, be an immediate regional challenge 
22

from a small universe of second-rate military powers 

prone to miscalculation. And, on the mid- to longterm horizon, emergence of near-peer or peer military 

competitor was accepted as gospel. 

The fear was that one or more of these state 

competitors would acquire “revolutionary technology” 

and undertake “associated military innovation” 

that would “fundamentally alter long-established 

concepts of warfare” and undermine traditional U.S. 

dominance.50 The likeliest future candidates at the high 

end of this category were a more activist and bellicose 

China or, more distantly, a reenergized and newly 

capable Russian Federation.51

Issues having little to do with organized military 

competition between states were considered boutique, 

speculative, and distracting from the real business of 

defense planning and traditional warfighting. This 

narrative stuck in the U.S. defense community precisely 

because it conformed to mental models shared by most 

inside DoD. 9/11 and subsequent experience in Iraq, 

Afghanistan, and the wider war on terrorism (WoT) 

changed all prevailing “mental models.” However, 

the extent to which it did so in a durable way is an 

open question. The defense and military bias in favor 

of convention is likely more deeply entrenched than 

outside observers appreciate. 

Earlier and more detailed examination of the gap 

might have limited the intensity of the post-9/11 shock.

Until 9/11 and subsequent irregular wars in Iraq and 

Afghanistan, defense strategists were the virtual 

prisoners of mechanical planning and programming 

processes from the theater- to the national-strategic 

level. These lent themselves easily to the evaluation of 

well-structured adversary military forces and actions. 

Predictably, they also resulted in the perpetuation 
23

of Cold War-like defense planning scenarios, stock 

war plans, force sizing and planning constructs, and 

acquisition strategies that: 

• First, were conceived of according to classically 

realist convention and inherited from or derivatives of strategic concepts and constructs more 

appropriate to the Cold War;

• Second, were often mistaken for or masquerading as coherent defense strategy;

• Third, failed to account for dangerous forces of 

social and political insecurity spinning off the 

decomposing Cold War order;

• Fourth, reflected a security environment senior 

leaders and strategists were intellectually best 

prepared for and also most comfortable with; 

and,52

• Fifth, ultimately proved unresponsive to a 

new, more unconventional defense-relevant 

challenge set.

Hindsight argues that defense concepts, sizing and 

shaping constructs, and plans devised in the decade 

prior to 9/11 were wholly inappropriate to the environment likeliest to emerge from the shock of the Cold 

War’s collapse.53 For example, neither successive 

force sizing and shaping constructs nor a whole range 

of associated U.S. war plans would have survived 

rigorous analysis intact were they measured against 

the serial human, material, and fiscal demands of 

simultaneous COIN/Security, Stabilization, and 

Reconstruction Operations (SSTRO) campaigns in 

Iraq and Afghanistan, or the persistent and unceasing 

demands of a wider WoT. A more thoughtful and 

unbiased analysis of the near- to long-term national 

security horizon in the wake of the Cold War might 
24

have resulted in a clearer, more nuanced, and more 

realistic view of defense-relevant demands in the 21st 

century. 

However, this more thoughtful and unbiased 

analysis also would have required senior defense 

leaders and strategists to explore the gap between 

conventional contingencies and extreme or speculative 

contingencies in much greater detail. Had this analysis 

occurred, it might have identified the increasing 

U.S. vulnerability to a whole range of consequential 

and potentially shocking challenges that were more 

complex and more unconventional than those imagined 

by defense leaders and strategists who continued to 

operate under a discredited Cold War rule set. Indeed, 

it may have accounted for the increasing likelihood 

of successive post-Cold War shocks to the defense 

establishment—e.g., 9/11, the WoT, and the Iraq 

insurgency—and the attendant requirement for DoD 

to either adjust to or be overwhelmed by the demands 

of the contemporary environment. 

Thoughtful assessments like this also would have 

put a number of contemporary (and preferred) defense 

priorities and methods at substantial risk. This would 

run afoul with a range of bureaucratic interests inside 

the Pentagon. Traditional core competencies, longlead weapons programs and investments, concepts of 

operation, and budget share would all have been in 

jeopardy to one extent or another. In some form, these 

inherently bureaucratic obstacles remain extant today. 

9/11 was important. However, was it important 

enough to make DoD’s appreciation of unconventional shocks irreversible? Without question, 9/11 

was a “game changer” for DoD.54 So, too, was the 

sudden onset of the insurgency in Iraq. In the wake of 

9/11, the on-going WoT, and active irregular conflicts 
25

in Iraq and Afghanistan, senior DoD leaders and 

strategists increasingly recognize the importance of 

defense-relevant shocks. On-going efforts like DoD’s 

“strategic trends and shocks” initiative and the State 

Department’s “Project Horizon” are embryonic efforts 

intended in part to institutionalize the concept of 

strategic shock in routine government planning and 

decisionmaking.55

Both efforts are futures oriented and preventive. 

Both are intended to help define near-term choices 

and decision space. Finally, both seek to shape 

priorities, capabilities, and strategic design in ways 

that will posture the defense and national security 

establishments to better anticipate, prevent, and, if 

prevention fails, respond decisively to sudden strategic 

shock in the future. 

The extent to which the national security establishment appreciates the potential value associated 

with maturing either or both of these efforts is 

uncertain. Yet, if the previous 7 years is an indication 

of a new more unconventional national security status 

quo, both “strategic trends and shocks” and “Project 

Horizon” merit continued support and development. 

The current defense team acknowledges this imperative. For example, on the subject of strategic trends and 

the prospect for their triggering dislocating shocks, the 

2008 NDS concludes, “How [strategic trends] interact 

and the nature of the shocks they might generate is 

uncertain; the fact that they will influence the future 

security environment is not.”56
26

SEEING THE WHOLE FUTURE: 

INCORPORATING SHOCKS IN DEFENSE 

STRATEGY

Without sophisticated advanced consideration of 

unconventional strategic shocks specifically, DoD’s 

frame of reference and tool-kit will be inadequate to 

contend with the most dangerous and complex future 

contingencies. Anticipation of unconventional shocks 

in particular is exceedingly important. This calls for a 

disciplined approach to their deliberate identification 

and analysis. 

In this regard, it is difficult to find something one is 

not first committed to looking for. The degree of danger 

or harm from defense-relevant strategic shocks more 

broadly is directly proportionate to DoD’s ability to 

see them coming in sufficient time and with sufficient 

clarity to affect meaningful advanced preparation. This 

requires a commitment to look for and examine shocks 

in the first place. 

Once identified as plausible, the most disruptive 

prospective shocks must become the subject of detailed 

interdisciplinary examination. All of this argues for 

continued defense and interagency investment in and 

routinization of initiatives like “strategic trends and 

shocks” and “Project Horizon.” The current defense 

team is inclined in this direction. According the recent 

NPS report:

One of the key objectives of the (d)epartment is developing 

a systematic process and intellectual foundation to 

identify key trends and shocks, and subsequent impacts 

of these shocks.57

Identifying on-coming defense-relevant shocks 

will never be a DoD responsibility alone. The more 

unconventional the prospective shock, the more this 
27

is the case. Likewise, preventing shocks or responding 

to them will always require the innovative blending 

of all instruments of national power. Both advanced 

warning of impending shock and the decisive blending 

of defense and non-defense resources in response rely 

on a whole-of-government commitment to tackle the 

topic from its infancy in an intellectually disciplined 

fashion. Having already invested in preliminary 

consideration of strategic shocks, DoD’s ongoing 

efforts should continue and mature in this regard. 

This intellectual heavy-lifting requires that shocks 

benefit from sufficient emphasis in future defense 

strategy development. This demands the interest 

and engagement of high-level DoD leadership. 

It further requires defense strategists who are 

adequately socialized to look for and contend with 

critical uncertainties, indications of sudden change 

in the environment, and, finally, shock. In general, it 

requires a defense establishment that is predisposed 

toward curiosity about and investigation into the 

unconventional and the unknown. All of these are in 

some respects countercultural. 

In short, strategic shocks should increasingly 

enter defense convention as a key driver for strategy 

development and strategic planning. According to 

Schwartz and Randall, “One cannot foresee strategic 

surprises without being imaginative, but the results will 

not be believed without being systematic.” 58 Indeed, if 

9/11, the WoT, and the Iraq insurgency are indicators, 

deliberate consideration within DoD of some key 

prospective shocks will be more important to strategic 

decisionmaking than will detailed examination of 

other long-standing conventional policy drivers. The 

latter are consistently over-considered and thus, wellunderstood. The recent past provides a tragic example 

of the “failure of imagination” in this respect. 
28

Naturally, there are both benefits and hazards 

to incorporating strategic shocks more broadly into 

defense decisionmaking. However, the benefits outweigh the hazards. According to Tangredi: 

Assessing the potential effects of wildcards may bring 

one to the point where imagination overtakes research. 

Nevertheless, sketching the outlines and prospective 

impacts of such unanticipated events helps identify the 

alternatives against which hedging strategies may be 

appropriate.59

As suggested above, deliberate consideration of 

the most consequential, high-impact unconventional 

shocks must be an interdisciplinary effort occurring at 

the intersection of strategy and policy development, 

intelligence, and defense analysis. Synthesized, 

interdisciplinary judgments on shocks ensures that 

any process chartered to examine them avoids the 

trap of becoming an unfocused, speculative, and 

overly academic examination of “what if” and instead 

becomes a policy-relevant input into the Secretary of 

Defense’s decision space on the merits of plausibility, 

strategic relevance, and impact. In order for these 

interdisciplinary judgments to have requisite influence 

on higher-level DoD decisionmaking, any examination 

of shocks must occur in close proximity to and have 

the attention of the Secretary of Defense himself. 

ROUTINIZING IMAGINATION: PLAUSIBLE 

UNCONVENTIONAL SHOCKS 

Illustrations of prospective shocks are more 

compelling to policymakers than are generalized 

descriptions of dangerous trends. General descriptions 

of dangerous trends, while important contextually, 

are not nearly as powerful to policymakers as are 
29

tight, illustrative descriptions of the most dangerous 

endpoints, waypoints, or discontinuous breaks in trend 

lines. Paraphrasing the 9/11 Commission, it is critically 

important for DoD to “routinize” consideration of 

plausible strategic shocks so as to posture it to better 

anticipate, hedge against, and respond to them in the 

most effective and risk-informed way.60 The following 

unconventional shocks are illustrative.

61 They are only 

intended to demonstrate the type of disruptive shock 

groups that merit deliberate consideration in future 

defense strategy deliberations. 

Strategic State Collapse.62

In the international system, some states matter 

more than others. There are a number of states whose 

stable functioning is uniquely important to the United 

States and its interests. Most of these states harbor 

vast potential for harm should they succumb to 

sudden, catastrophic instability or failure. This is true 

regardless of their pre-collapse disposition toward the 

United States—friendly, benign, or neutral. These are 

“strategic states” that:

• Possess significant employable weapons of mass 

destruction (WMD) capacity;63

• Possess significant strategic resources, economic 

capacity, and/or dominant geographic leverage;

• Are in close proximity to the United States or a 

key strategic partner and have a large dependent 

population vulnerable to uncontrolled migration;

• Could with unanticipated destabilization trigger 

contagious instability in an important region; 

and/or,

• Are allies or key strategic partners.
30

None of these categories are mutually exclusive. 

Failure, uncontrolled instability, or collapse of states 

exhibiting one or more of these qualities would present 

the United States with complex hybrid challenges. They 

may, for example, pose grave harm to the security of 

an important region. Alternatively, they may suddenly 

provide consequential opponents of the United States 

unrestricted access to or influence over a victim state’s 

assets, resources, and political outcomes. 

There are a number of plausible collapse scenarios. 

Triggers for collapse are rooted in irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid threats of purpose and context. 

Given the recognized instability of some strategic 

states, collapse might mark a natural endpoint to an 

already recognized and unfavorable trend. In other 

cases, strategic state collapse may arrive via “Black 

Swan” with little or no strategic warning. For DoD, 

the collapsed strategic state presents an immensely 

complex defense relevant challenge. Sheer capacity 

alone indicates a decisive DoD role in restoring a new 

more stable status quo. 

Fulfilling that role would be problematic given the 

character of the post-collapse environment.64 In the 

collapsed strategic state, elements of the armed forces 

and security services may remain under coherent 

command and control and actively resist intervention. 

Dedicated agents of the prior unstable status quo are 

prone to fight—often violently—to protect or restore 

vestiges of the old order. Criminals and “pop-up 

militias” are likely to carve out new, defensible spheres 

of influence from pieces of the fallen state. Adjacent 

powers will rush in physically, politically, and/or 

materially to decisively influence outcomes. Longrepressed political constituencies will be prone to seek 
31

out former oppressors and exact vengeance. Local 

nationalists will resist foreign imposed or inspired 

solutions. Some internal constituencies will fight to 

rebalance political authority. Others will fight against 

that rebalancing. Finally, supercharged indigenous and 

expatriate constituencies may sow instability beyond 

the borders of the victim state. All of this will occur in an 

environment where the surety of nuclear or biological 

weapons is in question, critical strategic resources are 

at risk, and/or the core interests of adjacent states are 

threatened by spillover. Further still, this will all occur 

in a sea of abject human insecurity. 

One of the most dangerous prospective contingencies in this regard might be collapse of a large capable state that results in a nuclear civil war. Uncontrolled proliferation in the event of a nuclear state’s 

collapse is an ever-present threat. However, here also 

DoD would have to contend with stabilization in the 

aftermath of nuclear use. It might be the lead agent 

in reassertion of responsible control over substantial 

nuclear weapons capabilities. Finally, it would likely 

be responsible for the armed separation of nucleararmed opponents and the deliberate disarmament of 

the various parties to the conflict. All of this would 

occur under the constant threat of continued nuclear 

use within or outside the confines of the victim state. 

Violent, Strategic Dislocation Inside the United 

States. 

As a community, the defense establishment swears 

to protect and defend the constitution against all 

enemies foreign and domestic. DoD’s role in combating 

“domestic enemies” has never been thoughtfully 

examined. Thus, there is perhaps no greater source 
32

of strategic shock for DoD than operationalizing that 

component of the oath of service in a widespread 

domestic emergency that entails rapid dissolution of 

public order in all or significant parts of the United 

States. 

While likely not an immediate prospect, this is 

clearly a “Black Swan” that merits some visibility inside 

DoD and the Department of Homeland Security. To 

the extent events like this involve organized violence 

against local, state, and national authorities and exceed 

the capacity of the former two to restore public order 

and protect vulnerable populations, DoD would 

be required to fill the gap. This is largely uncharted 

strategic territory. 

Widespread civil violence inside the United States 

would force the defense establishment to reorient 

priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order 

and human security. Deliberate employment of weapons of mass destruction or other catastrophic capabilities, unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters are 

all paths to disruptive domestic shock.

An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some 

or most external security commitments in order to 

address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home. 

Already predisposed to defer to the primacy of civilian 

authorities in instances of domestic security and divest 

all but the most extreme demands in areas like civil 

support and consequence management, DoD might 

be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources 

at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and 
33

reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under 

the most extreme circumstances, this might include 

use of military force against hostile groups inside the 

United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an 

essential enabling hub for the continuity of political 

authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict 

or disturbance. 

A whole host of long-standing defense conventions 

would be severely tested. Under these conditions and 

at their most violent extreme, civilian authorities, 

on advice of the defense establishment, would need 

to rapidly determine the parameters defining the 

legitimate use of military force inside the United States. 

Further still, the whole concept of conflict termination 

and/or transition to the primacy of civilian security 

institutions would be uncharted ground. DoD is 

already challenged by stabilization abroad. Imagine 

the challenges associated with doing so on a massive 

scale at home. 

Politics, Economics, Social Action, and Political 

Violence as Hybrid War.

The United States might also consider the prospect 

that hostile state and/or nonstate actors might 

individually or in concert combine hybrid methods 

effectively to resist U.S. influence in a nonmilitary 

manner.65 This is clearly an emerging trend. Imagine, for 

example, a China-Russia axis that collectively employs 

substantial political power within international institutions and markets to hold key American interests at 

risk. At the international level, actors like this might 

employ extant and emerging political/economic 

arrangements as instruments for purposeful resistance 

and war.66
34

At the national and subnational level, purposeful 

opponents could synchronize nonmilitary effort, 

agitating quasi-legitimate proxies into concerted social 

action and precision political violence targeted at 

nullifying traditional U.S. military advantages, limiting 

American freedom of action, and adversely shaping the 

strategic choices of or political outcomes inside key but 

vulnerable American partners.67 Imagine “a new era of 

containment with the United States as the nation to 

be contained” where the principal tools and methods 

of war involve everything but those associated with 

traditional military conflict.68 Imagine that the sources 

of this “new era of containment” are widespread; 

predicated on nonmilitary forms of political, economic, 

and violent action; in the main, sustainable over time; 

and finally, largely invulnerable to effective reversal 

through traditional U.S. advantages. 

The pressure on the United States would be 

cumulative and persistent. In the extreme, it could 

drive U.S. decisionmakers into increasingly desperate 

and potentially illegitimate counteraction. Under these 

circumstances, when competitor militaries are in the 

mix, they are less tools focused directly against U.S. 

military superiority and more effective foils against 

American military intimidation. In this regard, U.S. 

military forces would be sidelined. Employment of U.S. 

military power would hold little promise for reversing 

adverse political and economic conditions. Further, 

the overt use of military force by the United States 

would largely be viewed as illegitimate for redress of 

competitor success in nonmilitary domains. Finally, 

should the competition involve major competitors like 

China or Russia, U.S. military action might hazard 

unacceptable costs or unwanted and uncontrolled 

escalation.69
35

In this regard, the role of DoD would be more 

nuanced but also critical. This is particularly true to 

the extent that a hybrid competitor leverages some 

discriminate political violence against the United States 

or its partners as a force multiplier. Under conditions 

of hybrid war fought largely with nonmilitary and 

often nonviolent means, defense capabilities for direct 

action and intelligence gathering would need to be 

fine-tuned to both the more unconventional character 

of the conflict, as well as the high risks associated with 

military imprecision and miscalculation.

To the extent a hybrid conflict like this endures 

and remains substantially nonmilitary in character, 

DoD might witness both a significant re-rolling and a 

substantial loss of material resources as U.S. political 

leaders shore up more useful nonmilitary instruments 

of power. In either case, there is no contemporary 

strategic or doctrinal appreciation for the role of DoD in 

warfare prosecuted against the United States by other 

than military and predominantly nonviolent ways and 

means. Strategic shock would follow.

CONCLUSION—AVOIDING THE NEXT BLUE 

RIBBON PANEL —OR WORSE

The aforementioned are admittedly extreme. They 

are not, however, implausible or fantastical. Avoiding 

the next “blue ribbon panel,” chartered to investigate 

future failures of strategic imagination, requires 

that DoD continue its commitment to identifying 

and analyzing the most credible unconventional 

shocks on the strategic horizon. Increased attention 

to unconventional shocks in defense strategy should 

neither supplant prudent hedging against conventional 

surprise nor routine preparation for the likeliest 
36

defense-specific traditional, irregular, and catastrophic 

challenges. It should, however, become increasingly 

important in routine defense decisionmaking. 

Historically, shocks like Pearl Harbor, 9/11, 

and the Iraq insurgency have generated wrenching 

periods of self-examination. However, these periods 

of introspection most often focus on solving the last 

problem versus deliberately avoiding or contending 

with the next one. For example, DoD is admittedly better 

at COIN and CT in light of its post-9/11 experience. It 

is, however, reasonable to ask how relevant these are 

corporately to the next defense-relevant strategic shock. 

Absent continued reconnaissance into the future, there 

is no good answer to this question. 

Thus, prudent net and risk assessment of (1) the 

myriad waypoints along dangerous trend lines; (2) the 

sudden or unanticipated arrival at the end of the same 

trends; and finally, (3) rapid onset of the rarer “Black 

Swan” are increasingly important to DoD. Under this 

administration, valuable work has begun in this regard. 

This work should continue to mature uninterrupted. 

Preemptive examination of the most plausible “known 

unknowns” represents a reasoned down payment 

on strategic preparedness and an essential defense 

investment in strategic hedging against an uncertain 

and dangerous future. 

It would be wise for the next defense team to 

recall the experience of its predecessors. On September 

11th, 2001, the latter witnessed the disruptive collision 

of defense convention and strategic reality. The rest, as 

they say, is history. 
37

ENDNOTES

1. Hart Seely, “The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld: Recent Work 

by the Secretary of Defense,” Slate, available from www.slate.com/

id/2081042/, accessed August 28, 2008. Seely quotes Secretary of 

Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s now famous assertion, “As we know, 

there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. 

We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know 

there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown 

unknowns. The ones we don’t know we don’t know.” 

2. This is a common theme in post-9/11 government and 

academic commentary. See, for example, National Commission 

on Terrorist Attacks Upon the Nation, The 9/11 Commission Report, 

available from cnn.net/cnn/US/resources/9.11.report/911Report.pdf, 

accessed December 27, 2007, pp. 339-348; and Michael Ignatieff, 

“The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 

available from www.faculty.washington.edu/msingh/ignatieff.htm. 

The 9/11 Commission argued that first among the four critical 

failures that led to 9/11 or, at a minimum, led to the United States 

being caught unaware by 9/11 was a failure of “imagination.” 

Similarly, Ignatieff observed, “It was also, in the 1990s, a general 

failure of historical imagination, an inability of the post-cold war 

West to grasp that the emerging crisis of state order in so many 

overlapping zones of the world . . . would eventually become a 

security threat at home.” 

3. Jack Davis, Improving CIA Analytic Performance: Strategic 

Warning, Kent Center Occasional Papers, available from www.

cia.gov/library/kent-center-occaissional-papers/vol1no1.htm, accessed 

December 6, 2007.

4. See Peter Schwartz, Inevitable Surprises: Thinking Ahead 

in a Time of Turbulence, New York: Gotham Books, 2003, p. ix; 

Francis Fukuyama, “Chapter 1: The Challenges of Uncertainty: 

An Introduction,” in Francis Fukuyama, ed., Blindside: How 

to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics, An 

American Interest Book, Washington DC: Brookings Institution 

Press, 2007, p. 1; and Francis Fukuyama, “Chapter 15: Afterward,” 

in ibid., p. 170. Both Fukuyama and Schwartz suggest that 9/11 

and the Iraq insurgency were “strategic shocks.”
38

5. Both the terms defense-relevant and defense-specific are 

used in this monograph. Defense-relevant security challenges or 

conditions are mostly nonmilitary in character but should be of 

substantial interest to DoD. A defense-specific challenge is one that 

springs from a military source and requires primary involvement 

by DoD.

6. This point was raised in a conversation on this paper by 

Dr. Carl Van Dyke, a Senior National Intelligence Officer with the 

National Intelligence Council’s Office of the National Intelligence 

Officer for Long Range Warning. 

7. In this regard, military connotes those threats, activities, 

capabilities, or circumstances associated with the armed forces 

of states. Nonmilitary connotes security challenges, activities, 

capabilities, or circumstances whose origin and form have little in 

common with conventional conceptions of state armed forces. 

8. The same points are argued in the forthcoming CSIS 

publication by the author entitled “Shifting Emphasis: Leaders, 

Strategists, and Operators in an Era of Persistent Unconventional 

Conflict.”

9. Department of Defense (DoD), National Defense Strategy, 

June 2008, p. 5. 

10. The “Strategic Trends and Shocks” project on-going within 

OSD Policy Planning is a preliminary venture into the routinized 

inclusion of strategic shocks in defense strategy development. 

For helpful descriptions of this effort, see Naval Postgraduate 

School (NPS) Transformation Chair, Forces Transformation 

Chairs Meeting: Visions of Transformation 2025—Shocks and 

Trends, February 21, 2007, available from www.tfxchairs.net/cms/

files/TFX%20Mtg%20FEB07%20Report.doc, accessed August 21, 

2008; Terry Pudas, Trends and Shocks: An Alternative Construct 

for Defense Planning, available from www.federaltimes.com/index.

php?S=2752923, accessed May 19, 2007; and DoD, June 2008, pp. 

4-5. 

11. See Schwartz, p. xvii. Schwartz argues that shock (or in 

his words surprise) is inevitable and predictable. He concludes 

the preface with the following, “History provides ample reason 

to believe that we can expect inevitable surprises ahead.”
39

12. Sam J. Tangredi, “Chapter Seven, Wild Cards,” McNair 

Paper 63: All Possible Wars? Toward a Consensus View of the Future 

Security Environment, 2001-2025, November 2000, available from 

www.ndu.edu/inss/McNair/mcnair63/63_07.htm, accessed May 19, 

2008.

13. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “Chapter 9, Ahead of 

the Curve: Anticipating Strategic Surprise,” in Fukuyama, ed., 

Blindside, p. 93.

14. Ibid., p. 93.

15. Ibid., p. 94.

16. John L. Peterson, Out of the Blue: Wild Cards and Other Big 

Future Surprises; How to Anticipate and Respond to Profound Change, 

Washington, DC: The Arlington Institute, 1997, p. 10.

17. See Schwartz, 2003, p. 3. Schwartz observes:

There are many things we can rely on, but three of 

them are most critical to keep in mind in any turbulent 

environment.

First: There will be more surprises.

Second: We will be able to deal with them.

Third: We can anticipate many of them. In fact we can 

make some pretty good assumptions about how most of 

them will play out.

We can’t know the consequences in advance . . . but we 

know many of the surprises to come. Even the most 

devastating surprises . . . are often predictable because 

they have their roots in the driving forces at work 

today.

18. NPS Transformation Chair, p. 3.
40

19. Ibid. This is consistent with the DoD view of strategic 

shocks. The 2007 Naval Postgraduate School report suggests 

that DoD’s official view is that strategic shocks “undermine the 

assumptions on which all current policies are based.”

20. Ibid.

21. Thomas Schelling, “Foreword,” in Roberta Wohlstetter, 

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford, CA: Stanford 

University Press, 1962, p. viii.

22. For a valuable description of the idea of “trend lines” in 

a DoD context, see Naval Postgraduate School Transformation 

Chair, p. 3. Here trends are described as “(a) path along which 

events tend to evolve predictably.”

23. These two conclusions were the product of an informal 

discussion between the author and Kathleen Hicks of the Center 

for Strategic and International Studies and Robert Scher of the 

consulting firm Booze-Allen-Hamilton.

24. See Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the 

Highly Improbable, New York: Random House, 2007. Taleb argues 

a “Black Swan” has “three attributes.” First, they “lie outside the 

realm of regular expectations”; second, they promise “an extreme 

impact”; and, third, “in spite of its outlier status, human nature 

makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, 

making it explainable and predictable.”

25. NPS Transformation Chair, p. 3.

26. DoD, June 2008, p. 4.

27. Hugh Courtney, 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an 

Uncertain World, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001, p. 

29.

28. Ibid., p. 32.

29. See DoD, The National Defense Strategy of the United 

States of America, March 2005, p. 3. The 2005 National Defense 

Strategy defines “disruptive challenges” as those that “come from 
41

adversaries who develop and use break-through technologies to 

negate current U.S. advantages in key operational domains.”

30. Schelling, p. viii.

31. The author described irregular, catastrophic and hybrid 

challenges in great detail in a previous monograph. See Nathan 

Freier, Strategic Competition and Resistance in the 21st Century: 

Traditional, Irregular, Catastrophic, and Hybrid Challenges in Context, 

May 2007, available from www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/

pdffiles/pub782.pdf, accessed August 5, 2008. The author discusses 

threats of purpose and context in detail in the forthcoming 

CSIS monograph “Shifting Emphasis: Leaders, Strategists, and 

Operators in an Era of Persistent Unconventional Conflict.” On 

what the author means by the term “core interests,” see Peter 

Bergen and Laurie Garrett, “Report of the Working Group on 

State Security and Transnational Threats,” The Princeton Project 

on National Security, available from www.wws.princeton.edu/ppns/

conferences/reports/fall/SSTT.pdf, accessed December 27, 2007. The 

Princeton working group led by Bergen and Garrett identified 

a construct of “six fundamental interests” useful to consider as 

a template. These include “economic prosperity; governance 

continuity; ideological sustainability; military capability; 

population well-being; and territorial integrity.” 

32. See Phil Williams, From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark 

Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy, Carlisle, PA: Strategic 

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, June 2008, available 

from www.Strategic StudiesInstitute.army.mil/, accessed September 

11, 2008. Williams reinforces this point when he observes, 

In the 21st century in most parts of the world, issues of 

security and stability have little to do with traditional 

power politics, military conflict between states, and 

issues of grand strategy. Instead, they revolve around the 

disruptive consequences of globalization, governance, 

public safety, inequality, urbanization, violent nonstate 

actors, and the like.

Later, Williams returns to this point when he says, 
42

In a sense, states are being overwhelmed by complexity, 

fragmentation, and demands they simply are unable to 

meet. They are experiencing an unsettling diminution 

in their capacity to manage political, social, and 

economic problems that are increasingly interconnected, 

intractable, and volatile. 

33. Courtney, 20/20 Foresight, pp. 125-126.

34. Dr. Phil Williams, a Visiting Research Professor at the U.S. 

Army’s Strategic Studies Institute, made this observation during 

a conversation on a draft version of this monograph.

35. See war. (n.d.), Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1), available 

from dictionary.reference.com/browse/war, accessed August 5, 2008. 

Here war should be considered “active hostility or contention; 

conflict; contest.”

36. See DoD, March 2005, p. 2. The word “traditional” in this 

context implies “challenges posed by states employing recognized 

military capabilities and forces in well-understood forms of 

military competition and conflict.” 

37. The following section includes adaptations of arguments 

made by the author in the forthcoming CSIS monograph “Shifting 

Emphasis: Leaders, Strategists, and Operators in an Era of 

Persistent Unconventional Conflict.”

38. DoD, June 2008, p. 4.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., p. 9.

41. Schelling, p. vii.

42. Military is this regard connotes security challenges, 

activities, capabilities, or circumstances associated with the armed 

forces of states.

43. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the Nation, 

The 9/11 Commission Report, available from cnn.net/cnn/US/
43

resources/9.11.report/911Report.pdf, accessed December 27, 2007, p. 

344.

44. DoD, “Section III: Defense Strategy,” Quadrennial Defense 

Review, May 1997, available from accessedwww.fas.org/man/docs/

qdr/sec3.html, accessed May 19, 2008.

45. Fukuyama, “Chapter 1,” in Fukuyama, ed., Blindside, p. 2. 

46. Fukuyama, “Chapter 15,” in ibid., pp. 169-172. 

47. Ibid., pp. 169-170.

48. Ibid., p. 171.

49. Ibid.

50. DoD, March 2005, p. 3.

51. See DoD, June 2008, pp. 10-11. This trend endures today. 

Note the language in the current NDS.

52. See DoD, March 2005, p. iii. The 2005 NDS recognizes this 

latter point when, in the foreword, Secretary Rumsfeld observes, 

“The National Defense Strategy outlines our approach to dealing 

with challenges we will likely confront, not just those we are 

currently best prepared to meet.” 

53. Ibid., pp. 2-3.

54. See, for example, Schwartz and Randall, p. 93. With 

respect to 9/11, Schwartz and Randall observe, “(E)ven the 

most devastating surprises are often inevitable. Many people 

did anticipate the terrorist attacks of September 11 . . . Yet, most 

Americans, as well as officials in both the Clinton and Bush 

administrations, focused their attention elsewhere while the 

inevitable grew imminent.”

55. For a discussion of “Project Horizon,” see Sid Kaplan, 

Project Horizon—A New Approach to Interagency Planning, available 

from www.epa.gov/osp/futures/Project Horizon.pdf, accessed May 19, 

2008. 
44

56. Department of Defense, 2008, p. 5.

57. NPS Transformation Chair, p. 3.

58. Schwartz and Randall, p. 97-98.

59. Tangredi, “Chapter Seven: Wild Cards.”

60. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the Nation, 

The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 344.

61. The detail expressed herein does not reflect official U.S. 

government policy.

62. See DoD, 2008, p. 9; and NPS Transformation Chair, p. 6. 

Strategic state collapse is clearly on the defense radar screen as 

a prospective strategic shock. The author is currently writing a 

monograph on the policy implications associated with strategic 

state collapse. 

63. The author is principally concerned here with sizeable 

nuclear or biological capabilities.

64. See Freier, Strategic Competition, p. 58-59. A similar 

description of strategic state collapse is included in a previous 

monograph by the author.

65. Ibid., pp. 47-52.

66. In an initial conversation on this project with with D. 

Burgess Laird of the Institute for Defense Analysis, Laird raised 

existing institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Council, the 

United Nations General Assembly, etc. as potential forums for 

future coordinated political competition with the United States.

67. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

68. Schwartz and Randall, p. 108.

69. Freier, Stategic Competition, p. 51.