Strategic Empathy: Examining Pattern Breaks to Better Understand Adversaries
| by Sarah Bidgood, Robert Carlin, Siegfried Hecker, Jim Lamson, and and Hanna Notte
Drawing from the work of Zachary Shore and others, we define strategic empathy as “the sincere effort to identify and assess the genuine patterns of an adversary’s acquisition, threat of use, and use of strategic weapons and the underlying drivers and constraints that shape them.” This concept encapsulates a mindset, a lens, and an approach that help us to understand an adversary’s strategic thinking.