Consistent with the prioritization of critical technology areas articulated in the recent U.S. National Security Strategy, the Center for Strategic Deterrence and Weapons of Mass Destruction Studies (CSDWMDS) maintains a core focus on implications of disruptive technologies for current and future warfare. Advances in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum technologies, advanced materials, and unmanned vehicular systems are transforming the ways that state and non-state actors may develop, and deploy capabilities that blur traditional distinctions of conventional and unconventional weapons-of-mass-destruction and maximum disruption.
The CSDWMD’s mission encompasses analyses of broader technological ecosystems that enable new forms of tactical flexibility and strategic leverage. The National Security Strategy emphasizes the need for the United States to anticipate, guide, and responsibly govern such disruptive innovations while maintaining technological advantage and credible deterrence against peer competitors and adversaries.
Toward these goals, and supported by INSS Programs in Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare, and Homeland Defense, the CSDWMDS conducts interdisciplinary research, strategic foresight analysis, professional military education, and engagement with joint forces, allies, industry, and policy makers that address how emerging technologies are altering threat landscapes, reducing barriers to WMD-relevant capabilities, and introducing novel operational concepts in current and future non-kinetic and kinetic engagements, to respond to WMD-related threats in an era increasingly defined by technological disruption.
Read our Disruptive Technology publications.