Methods for evaluating the efficacy of potential arms control treaties are crucial to ensuring arms control objectives can be met. However, current methodologies for evaluating arms control validation exercises either omit evaluation of the larger system or use a “sum of parts” approach where the performance and vulnerabilities of individual components of the exercise are simply summed to quantify the entirety of the exercise. These methodologies ignore the emergent behavior induced by the relationships between components and fail to sufficiently optimize system design to best meet objectives. New technologies further complicate efforts to apply data-driven approaches, especially those which rely on historically established performance data. It is necessary to develop new techniques capable of handling the myriad investigative scenarios possible under a treaty; and for these techniques to be effective, they need to be capable of providing quantitative, actionable feedback even with limited available data, historical or otherwise. In this paper, we present a system-evaluation method developed to support decision-makers in treaty design by bridging the gap between measurement technologies and treaty objectives. Here, we establish a framework for the application of Dempster-Shafer (evidence) theory to the problem of treaty evaluation. Dempster-Shafer theory — and more specifically the theory of hints approach introduced by Kohlas and Monney (1995) — provides a mechanism for modeling treaty knowledge as probabilistic assumption-based reasoning, and explicitly accounts for the uncertainty present in validation exercises. We apply this framework to variations on a simple hypothetical treaty inspection and demonstrate how it can be used to determine preferable scenarios.
Year
2024
Abstract