A Structured Elicitation Approach to Identify Technology-Based Challenges: With Application to Inform Force Planning for Technological Surprise

Abstract

The primary goal of RAND's 2040 Challenges project was to draw on the inherent and diverse expertise of RAND staff to explore a wide range of possible challenges to Joint Force operations and the Department of Defense (DoD) that could, singly or in combination, compromise or even defeat the United States in a future conflict with a peer adversary. The effort was meant to both inform the priorities of Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD[R and E]), as well as develop an approach to "crowdsourcing" ideas within RAND that could be applied to future policy questions. Accomplishing this meant developing an approach and applying the approach to two related but differentiable tasks: ideation, which is the task of coming up with concepts for the challenges ("Sharks with lasers to threaten submarines!"), and evaluation, which is assessing the quality of each idea ("Laser energy propagates poorly underwater, and besides, the sharks would probably eat their trainers"). The research team conducted these tasks by developing two different approaches, each drawing from a different but potentially overlapping set of RAND participants. One of these approaches focused on using structured elicitation and evaluation of challenges from internal RAND researchers with expertise in relevant areas (i.e., RAND experts). It is the focus of this brief report. The other approach combined an open solicitation of ideas with their vetting using a market mechanism, both open to all RAND staff. The outputs from both approaches were used to inform the main report of the project, Force Planning for Technological Surprise.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2021
Accession Number
AD1150236

Entities

People

  • Jon Schmid
  • Lauren A. Mayer
  • Marjory S. Blumenthal
  • Sydney J. Litterer

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Brain Injuries
  • Brain-Computer Interfaces
  • Climate Change
  • Cognitive Science
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Control Systems
  • Department Of Defense
  • Directed Energy Weapons
  • Engineering
  • Governments
  • Information Systems
  • Internet Of Things
  • Military Science
  • National Security
  • Psychology
  • Quantum Computing
  • United States
  • Unmanned Aerial Systems
  • Unmanned Systems
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Defense Technology Research and Development.
  • Software Engineering.
  • Strategic Security Studies

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy