strategy
Developing an integrated warning-response framework
Description:
The complexity of world events combined with the compressed time span within which decision makers are expected to craft and articulate a policy to deal with unfolding crises make it harder, yet at the same time more necessary, for intelligence analysts and policymakers to work within an integrated "warning-response" framework. Indeed, the need for such an integrated approach was the fundamental lesson drawn from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and provided the starting point for post-World War II efforts to design systems and procedures for avoiding such a lapse. Context:
As with the need to respond effectively to avoid a surprise attack, preventive action to deter the outbreak of various post -- Cold War crises also demands an integrated warning-response framework. Yet, for such crises, the warning-response problem is often more complicated and difficult than for avoiding surprise attack. In the latter case, policymakers have already determined that some set of observable hostile actions would be an unmistakable threat and have the strongest possible incentives to acquire timely warning and to respond to that threat in some way. The same cannot be said for many lesser contingencies, such as ethnic conflicts or patterns of gross human rights abuses. Since situations of this kind -- even in crisis -- pose a much less grave threat to the interests of a third party, policymakers are often less inclined to demand early warning or to take it seriously and respond to it.Once the problem of warning is linked with its implications for action, it becomes significantly redefined. Early warning of a possible crisis is desirable not in and of itself but insofar as it provides decision makers with an opportunity to make a timely response of an appropriate kind that might be otherwise impossible. Warning gives the decision maker time to decide what to do and then to prepare to do it. Warning provides an opportunity to avert the expected crisis, to modify it, or to redirect it into some less dangerous and less costly direction. On occasion, warning may provide an opportunity to deal with a conflict-of-interest situation or misperceptions before they lead to a military conflict.
A number of experienced intelligence and policy specialists have endorsed the need for developing a response "repertoire" that includes a wide array of responses, some small, possibly covert, and low cost, others large, public, and more costly. The rationale that "the response must fit the warning" is a simple one, but not one easily realized. The response repertoire, of course, should include the many different responses that can be made by nongovernmental organizations.
Subjects:
Societal Problems → PreventionDevelopment → Development
Type Classification:
F: Exceptional strategies Related UN Sustainable Development Goals:
