The “ day after ” methodology and national security analysis

The development of analytic tools to help those making national security policy is driven by the need for usable answers and the urgency of the threats facing the United States. The interaction of these two drivers has produced an array of approaches that favor insights derived from experience with international phenomena. After all, conducting empirically valid tests of means-ends relationships in international politics is all but impossible, so implicit models must substitute for hard-to-get experimental data. Most analysts resort to historical comparisons, reasoning via analogy, or conceptualizations that are mathematically rigorous but empirically dubious or even trivial. The “lessons of history” are said to counsel, variously, caution or haste, conservatism or aggression. Appeasement is seen as dangerous, deterrence as infallible but tenuous. Similarities between cases present and past are endlessly discussed with no firm conclusions possible or persuasive—at least as determined through analysis alone.