Methodology Note: Alternative Futures Forecasts 05-08

X-Axis Diversity in US National Security with Y-Axis Sources of Foreign-Based Threats to America

To challenge the flaws in conventional forecasting methods, Girl Security’s forecasts are based on drivers whose intersections fail to receive mainstream attention. The drivers themselves are derived from trends that Girl Security’s communities identify as being of special concern to them, rather than from trends based on traditional economic and societal indicators. For more on the systemic data gaps and flawed assumptions embedded in conventional futures forecasting that our approach seeks to mitigate, please see the introduction to Girl Security’s Alternative Futures Forecasts.

Key Findings:

• Given the widening gap between the threats that Americans are most fearful of and those that the national security apparatus has traditionally funded and prioritized, logically, one must conclude that there is a misalignment.
• Additionally, the conventional focus and traditional national security workforce will be hard-pressed to anticipate the growing diversity of threats America faces from foreign, non-state, domestic, and unattributable actors.
• Criticism of diversifying the experiences and cultural expertise of the national security workforce directly contradicts criticism, often from the same quarters, that the traditional national security workforce has historically failed to warn of evolving security challenges and engaged in groupthink.
• Condemning efforts to diversify the national security workforce is akin to suggesting that the only threat the United States needs to be prepared to for is one that would come from adversaries whose experiences and cultural expertise are aligned with the conventional thinking of the historical national security workforce, which was traditionally predominantly white