Information dominance has been essential to ensuring U.S. military effectiveness, sustaining the credibility and assurance of military alliances, and stabilizing or reducing the risks of miscalculation or collateral damage. But can there be too much of a good thing?

Improvements to strategic situational awareness (SA)—the ability to characterize the operating environment, detect and respond to threats, and discern actual attacks from false alarms across the spectrum of conflict—have long been assumed to reduce the risk of conflict and help manage crises more successfully when they occur. However, with the development of increasingly capable strategic SA-related technology, growing comingling of conventional and nuclear SA requirements and capabilities, and the increasing risk of conventional conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, this may no longer be the case. The Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the University of California, Berkeley’s Nuclear Policy Working Group undertook a two-year study to examine the implications of emerging situational awareness technologies for managing crises between nuclear-armed adversaries.

Acknowledgments iii

Chapter 1 1

Introduction 1

The Growing Nuclear Shadow 2

The Evolving Strategic Situational Awareness (SA) Ecosystem 3

Pathways to Escalation 6

Evolution or Revolution? 8

Chapter 2 | Understanding Situational Awareness Technologies and the Emerging Situational Awareness Ecosystem 10

Platforms, Critical Enablers, and Defense and Counter Capabilities 10

Key Attributes of Strategic SA Capabilities 11

Surveying the Global Strategic SA Capabilities Landscape 15

Chapter 3 | Risk Factors of Situational Awareness Technology and Strategic Stability 19

Advanced Strategic SA Capabilities and Stability Risks 19

Assessing Risk in the Emerging Strategic SA Ecosystem 20

Action-Reaction: Understanding Dynamic Risk Factor Interactions 24

Risk Versus Reward: Evaluating Strategic SA Capabilities 25

Chapter 4 | Pathways to Escalation 28

Provocation 28

Entanglement 33

Information Complexity 38

Chapter 5 | Tabletop Exercise Takeaways 44

Analysis 48

Chapter 6 | The Way Ahead 54

Key Conclusions 55

Recommendations 57

About the Authors 58