Title: Creative use of scenarios
Description: 'Surprise and the Single Scenarios' is the title of an article by Sir James Cable. The      essence of his thesis is that the United Kingdom should not prepare its military with just      one contingency in mind. Related theses have been debated for many years; should      Soviet military strategy be based upon the doctrinal assumption of quick escalation to      nuclear war? Should U.S. nuclear forces be procured with the requirement to survive a      well executed surprise first strike? In considering these and related political-military      questions, scenarios are often created to flesh out the concept being considered. For      example, military planners in the USSR undoubtedly use alternating scenarios to consider      possible courses that armed conflict could take in order that they might assess the impact      of short or long time scales on nuclear/conventional interactions. Similarly, varying      scenarios are used in the U.S. to demonstrate the impact of different threat assumptions      on the amount and types of nuclear forces that the U.S. should buy that would 'guarantee'      an acceptable level of retaliation. The major point to all this, and this report, is that in      order to perform complex political military assessments, political scientists either explicitly      or implicitly use operations analysis techniques, including simulations, gaming and      scenarios.
Subjects: SCENARIOS, MILITARY STRATEGY