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• Growth in scientific research on the causes of war and the drivers of conflict escalation provides a valuable resource to create scenarios that more accurately present the conditions that could create future crises or conflict.
• The onset of conflict is deeply influenced by structural and proximate variables.
• Some of the structural and proximate nonmilitary factors — such as the tendency toward the multilateralization of disputes, alliance building, and serial crises — carry important implications for military decisions.

Among the most important types of decisions that confront decisionmakers and defense planners are those that commit a nation to conflict, calibrate the use of force to achieve overall strategic goals, and de-escalate a crisis situation in a manner consistent with political objectives. Decisions that authorize a dramatic initiation or escalation of force can carry profound implications for a nation's economy, strategic situation, or survival. Scenario-based analysis remains the most developed and useful tool to support such decisionmaking, but the lack of guidance on how to incorporate nonmilitary factors has often resulted in scenarios that suffer problems of opaque methodology, unsupported assumptions, and implausibility.

In this report, the authors aim to achieve four things. First, they distinguish between political-strategic and military decisions in the work of defense planning. Second, they explain why the current approach to employing scenario analysis to support political-strategic decisions is problematic. Third, they argue that recent findings in social science regarding variables related to crises and wars offer the potential to remedy these defects and aid the development of scenarios that are more rigorous, transparent, and politically realistic. Finally, the authors show how analysts can incorporate these factors into more-holistic and more-realistic assumptions through a process that generates "science-based structured scenarios." To illustrate how this methodology might be applied, the authors provide an example centered on a hypothetical China-Taiwan conflict.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Distinguishing Between Military and Political-Strategic Decisions in Defense Planning

• Chapter Three

  A Way Forward: Science-Based Structured Scenarios

• Chapter Four

  Developing Science-Based Structured Scenarios

• Chapter Five

  Conclusion

• Appendix A

  Variation in Nonmilitary Factors for Different Types of Crisis and Conflict Situations

• Appendix B

  Sample Scenario Build: China-Taiwan Conflict Onset