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Concepts and techniques are now emerging that could be a unifying influence for strategic analysis of NATO issues. These will make possible multiscenario analysis and the development and testing (through simulation) of complex strategies incorporating a diversity of ideas and capabilities, and reflecting recognition that operational strategy should be adaptive and multifaceted. It is possible that greater consensus will develop within the several analytic and strategic communities, and that this is in turn will influence policy. The author believes that a way to start would involve a NATO- wide professional association, with NATO sanction, that would seek to bring together special groups with the purpose of improving prospects for modeler- analysts (working at varied levels of detail), technologists, and strategies being able to speak in a common language and calibrate their assumptions. Subsequently, it would be useful to compare multiscenario balance assessments-- with the objective of seeing whether agreement can be reached on the complex strategies and sets of capabilities needed by NATO in the face of continuing threat and uncertainty. (edc)

This paper is the outgrowth of an invited speech to the German Strategy Forum in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, West Germany, on December 3, 1984. It is addressed to those who are already inclined to believe in the desirability, importance, and feasibility of conventional defense for NATO. The debate about NATO's defense options has changed little in more than twenty years, with even less convergence of views. This nonconvergence has its principal origins in politics, economics, and the sociology of democracies, but the problem has been exacerbated by the absence of a coherent analytic framework within which to force issues toward resolution. Fortunately, the environment is now changing and the prospect exists for a more enlightened approach that would regularly bring together military officers, historians, technologists, and quantitative analysts--both those concerned primarily with simple models and resource issues and those concerned primarily with the phenomena of warfare and simulation models. The improved environment includes increased interest in analytic realism, operational relevance, combined-arms planning, and in actually solving military problems. With this background, then, the major point of this paper is that defense planning in the new environment should increasingly make use of conceptual structures akin to global political-military war gaming.