Timothy R Gulden

This report examines climate adaptation strategies for 25 National Critical Functions (NCFs) at risk of disruption from climate change. The focus is on impact pathways, each of which is a combination of climate drivers (such as drought and flooding) and impact mechanisms (such as physical damage and workforce shortages) affecting a given NCF. The emphasis is on strategies that owner-operators of critical functions might implement.

This report, the second of a two-volume series, provides technical details in support of the first volume, Leveraging Complexity in Great-Power Competition and Warfare: Volume I, An Initial Exploration of How Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking Can Frame Opportunities and Challenges. It contains a literature review of complex adaptive system (CAS) research, a CAS lens user manual, and a Markov chain formulation of the adversary decision process.

The authors seek to provide an initial examination of how complex adaptive systems thinking can frame opportunities and challenges of complexity in warfare. They examine how complex adaptive systems thinking can be applied to great-power competition and warfare to aid in understanding how complexity might be exploited to U.S. advantage.

Mosaic warfare is named for the idea of creating a complex image from small pieces. This report studies Mosaic warfare and explores three dimensions of variability: (1) fractionation of capabilities from large multicapability platforms onto multiple smaller ones; (2) employment of heterogenous mixes of capabilities throughout a battlespace; and (3) rapid composition of a set of needed capabilities in a time and place to accomplish a mission.

Modeling and simulation, if well rooted in social-behavioral (SB) science, can inform planning about some of the most vexing national problems of our day. Unfortunately, the current state of SB modeling and related analysis is not yet up to the job. This report diagnoses the problems, identifies the challenges, and recommends ways to move ahead so that SB modeling will be more powerfully useful for aiding decisionmaking.