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The defense planning process uses scenarios for a range of purposes, complicating selection criteria

• Defense strategic guidance uses scenarios to create a list of generic capabilities. However, any given set of capabilities required in one scenario may be vastly different in scale and composition than the capabilities used in another scenario.

The primary challenges in using scenarios reside in their practical implementation, not in the overall structure of the process

• The current process pays significant attention to the choice of assumptions, but it lacks time and resources to adequately explore the implications of these assumptions.
• There are any number of potential wars the United States could fight, and the compound probability of some of them occurring simultaneously is rarely seriously examined. Therefore, choosing to size or prepare for any combination of scenarios involves guesswork rather than meaningful strategic judgment.
• The quality and utility of the process are functions of strong senior leadership engagement and commitment.

The process of narrowing down to a handful of force planning scenarios can be subjective and arbitrary

• Senior defense leaders are understandably preoccupied with the challenges immediately in front of them and generally less interested in thinking about long-range or out-of-the-box scenarios.

The assessment of scenarios has become so exhaustive and inflexible that it constrains the responsiveness of the overall process

• The employment of scenarios in support of defense planning is not in need of a radical overhaul, but important improvements need to be made to enhance its credibility, agility, and robustness.

This report — Phase Two of a three-phase project — explores the current defense planning process used by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), with a focus on how scenarios are developed and employed to support defense planning. The authors examine and critique how scenarios are used in current planning processes, based on an assessment of unclassified documents and dialogues with current and former participants in the process. They find that the process is structurally sound but insufficiently flexible. In theory, many opportunities, methods, and means exist to respond to a changing security environment. However, in practice, the layers of approval required for new concepts, lengthy intradepartmental coordination, exhaustive detail required for the preferred formal modeling, and the resource-intensiveness of the entire process — even as headquarters shrink — often make the system unable to generate new scenarios and concepts for an area of interest in a timely manner. Instead, DoD ends up with a single new authoritative scenario — a point solution rather than an exploration of the many policy-relevant differences that might affect how a conflict unfolds. Just as important, the process both obscures critical uncertainties and smothers innovation. The process tends to be unwelcoming to innovative or controversial ideas or initiatives that might further delay decisions about the new "canonical" scenario still further. This process can work during times of continuity (scenario diversity is developed over several years) — but, during times of sudden discontinuity, it seriously reduces DoD's responsiveness. The authors offer recommendations to address these challenges.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  What Are the Typical Approaches to Defense Planning?

• Chapter Three

  Challenges in Defense Planning Methodology: The Use of Scenarios

• Chapter Four

  Conclusions and Recommendations