ABSTRACT
The intersection of digital and physical security is critical to the future of our military and national defense. Impending technological advances widen the attack plain over the next decade including cyber, physical, and kinetic vulnerabilities. Visualizing what the future will hold and what new threat vectors could emerge is a task that, in the 21st century, traditional military planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish. Helping to understand and plan for the future operating environment is the basis of a research effort known as Threatcasting.
Threatcasting, is an analytic technique, that focuses on the intersection between cyber and physical domains. Threatcasting uses inputs from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and science fiction to create potential futures and then defines how to disrupt, mitigate and recover from them.
The implications of Threatcasting on Operation Research intersect in four key areas: the analysis of alternative, wargaming, optimization, and data analysis after data framing. Ultimately Operational Research seeks to deal with uncertainty. Using Threatcasting allows practitioners to process a wide range of disparate inputs to understand a wider range of possible futures. In this way Threatcasting can be a way to process uncertainty and take action.
