Strategic competition with near peer threats such as Russia and China replaced a focus on non-state extremist threats. Competition “success” is measured by domestic stability, strong alliances, networks and partners; the goal is greater influence in order to shape international norms, institutions. In the current information saturated age, manipulation of truth is common and propaganda can be used to weaponize information in order to compete. Diplomatic and economic strategies (e.g., Belt Road) are also important. Competitive advantage requires national ambition, unified identity, will, effective institutions. Analytics and modeling for strategic competition must characterize competitors across multiple information vectors (culture, cyber, diplomatic, social-cyber, economic, etc.) with “emic” (1st person), “etic” (3rd person) perspectives, leveraging expert-AI to contextualize information for situation awareness, planning, developing tactics for behavior change without war. This paper highlights the state-of-the-knowledge/art re: behaviors and assessment of strategic competition, spotlighting gaps, issues (e.g., inappropriate/outdated assumptions) and identifies future research areas.
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