Special Notice Information Innovation Office Future Program: National Security Economic Theory (NASCENT)

PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT

The purpose of this Special Notice is to provide public notification of additional research areas of interest to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O), specifically for the forthcoming National Security Economic Theory (NASCENT) program by I2O Program Manager, David Rushing Dewhurst. If released, the solicitation will be made available at https://sam.gov.

PROGRAM BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

The NASCENT program seeks to create the theoretical foundation for geoeconomics1 to eventually enable evidence-based economic statecraft in furtherance of U.S. national security objectives. If successful, NASCENT will form a principled foundation for national security economic strategy and define a new scholarly field of quantitative geoeconomics.

To promote U.S. national security objectives, the U.S. has applied tools of economic statecraft to engage in deterrence and combat its adversaries.2 Yet the U.S. Government lacks tailored, effective, and predictable options, remaining equipped only with tools that are either too narrowly targeted for today’s global competition (e.g., entity-level sanctions) or that can rapidly escalate tensions (e.g., nation-level embargoes).

NASCENT will test the technical hypothesis that economic mechanism design, computer science formal methods, and experimental economics can be combined to construct a robust scientific framework for geoeconomics. Such a framework would entail joint analysis of precisely defined national security objectives and economic incentives of diverse public and private entities.

NASCENT starts from the observation that all existing work in geoeconomics analyzes “forward” from existing economic structures, attempting to identify mappings from those structures to national security outcomes. Conversely, NASCENT would combine techniques from economic mechanism design, formal methods, and experimental economics to work backwards from precisely described desired national security states to understand what economic incentives and mechanisms enable those outcomes.