Decision-Support Tools for National Policymakers

Dr. Christopher Ford • November 20, 2021

The MITRE Corporation published a paper on November 19, 2021, to outline an approach being developed by its researchers to help U.S. leaders make better use of subject-matter expertise in complex policymaking situations such as great power competition with  the People's Republic of China.  Dr. Ford's paper explains the MITRE approach and urges its further exploration as a decision-support tool.  You can download the full paper using the button below, or access it from MITRE's website here.

Download GPC Tools Paper

Executive Summary


Decision-support tools cannot replace the human judgment of high-level decision-makers, but they can assist national leaders in addressing complex national challenges. This paper offers a brief outline of one emergent decision-support methodology that is being developed and evaluated at the MITRE Corporation to support decision-making in advancing U.S. interests in our country’s strategic competition with China. This MITRE methodology captures rigorously-structured insights from a community of human Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and then incorporates these inputs into a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model. Beyond simply testing candidate Courses of Action (COAs) against this aggregated expertise, this methodology also permits users to adjust its parameters to test policy ideas against alternative environments. It thus has great promise in helping U.S. leaders cope with a challenging security environment.

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Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his oral remarks at a conference sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge University on June 17, 2025. 
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Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew in delivering his remarks at a conference on "Transatlantic Turbulence: What Next for European Defence?" held at the University of Birmingham on June 13, 2025.
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Below are the remarks Dr. Ford delivered (virtually) to a conference in Beijing on June 12, 2025, sponsored by the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN) and the Grandview Institution .
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Below are the prepared remarks upon which Dr. Ford based some of his contributions on a panel on “Tech for War or Tech for Peace? Science, Innovation, and Emerging Technologies in a New Geopolitical Era” at a conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, on May 22, 2025, sponsored by the Arms Control Negotiation Academy (ACONA) and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF).
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Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford based his opening remarks on May 21, 2025, when moderating the opening panel – entitled “NATO and Allied Perspectives on Multi-Domain Operations: A Common Understanding or Diverging Views?” – at the conference on Multi-Domain Operations sponsored by NATO’s Supreme Allied Command Transformation (ACT) in Ankara, Türkiye. (His remarks consisted only of his personal views, and do not necessarily represent those of anyone else.)
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Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford based his remarks on a webinar organized by the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) on April 28, 2025.
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Below is the prepared text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making his informal remarks on April 21, 2025, at the biennial nuclear policy conference held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. You can find a video of the panel discussion here .
By Dr. Christopher Ford March 15, 2025
Below is the text upon which Dr. Ford drew in making his informal remarks to a March 13, 2025, workshop as part of the “Future of Arms Control Project” sponsored by the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding (CCDP).
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