IA/PHIL 314. Strategy Assessment:
Examines strategy assessment in national, military, counter-, and competitive intelligence. By applying probabilities and goals to potential threats and opportunities (short and long-term), students will learn the most relevant methods for formulating and evaluating possible courses of action, and projecting and explaining actions by assessing an agent’s strategic interests and circumstances.
Course Objectives:
Students will develop knowledge and skills to
- identify implicit strengths, weakness, threats and opportunities before they become widely recognized
- distinguish different strategic contexts and the principles for assessing them such as decision-making under risk, unilateral decision-making under uncertainty, and multilateral decision-making under uncertainty
- formulate and evaluate possible courses of action based on the values and needs of a particular agent
- project an agent’s actions by identifying the course of action that best advances their goals.
- explain an agent’s actions by reconstructing their assessment of their possible courses of action and how one came to be regarded as the best.
Course Outline:
- Decision-Making Contexts: unilateral vs. multilateral, risk, uncertainty, and quasi-uncertainty
- The intelligence-relevant conceptual foundations of decision theory
- The intelligence-relevant conceptual foundations of game theory
- The intelligence-relevant principles of sequential decision-making
- The intelligence-relevant principles of cooperative decision-making
- Methods for inference of other agent’s utility and probability assignments
- Practice in applying the above to a wide range of actual case
