A Policy Agenda for the Age of Synthetic Asymmetry

Synthetic Asymmetry has rewritten the cost structure of strategic competition. The convergence of artificial intelligence, cyber capability, and synthetic media has reduced the barrier to generating strategic effects to a level accessible to state and non-state actors alike. Deterrence alone cannot address a threat defined by speed, deniability, and convergence. For a full account of the framework and its analytical foundations, visit the Synthetic Asymmetry research hub. What follows is ISRS's policy agenda for building synthetic resilience, defined as the capacity to absorb, adapt to, and recover from SA-enabled disruption, across six domains of action.

I. Doctrinal Reorientation

1. Retire deterrence as the primary organizing principle against sub-threshold threats. Deterrence assumes a legible adversary and a calculable cost-benefit decision. SA operates through speed, deniability, and convergence. Doctrine must shift from punishment to resilience.

2. Adopt synthetic resilience as a named strategic objective. Governments and alliances should formally define synthetic resilience as a distinct doctrinal goal, distinct from general preparedness and critical infrastructure protection.

3. Align national security strategy to the SA threat model. Strategy documents should explicitly account for the cost asymmetry SA introduces rather than treating AI, cyber, and synthetic media as separate threat categories.

II. Institutional Architecture

4. Break down inter-agency and allied silos around information-domain threats. SA exploits the seams between intelligence, military, diplomatic, and law enforcement authorities. Standing cross-domain coordination mechanisms are required.

5. Establish joint cognitive security centers within alliances. NATO and partner groupings should create permanent, jointly staffed bodies responsible for detecting and countering coordinated information operations.

6. Mandate multi-stakeholder threat-sharing between government and the private sector. Critical infrastructure operators, platform companies, and financial institutions are first-contact targets in most SA campaigns. Formal threat intelligence sharing with appropriate safe harbor protections is a structural requirement.

7. Create a National Resilience Compact model. Governments should establish a public-private compact defining mutual obligations during SA-enabled disruption, including accelerated depreciation incentives for resilience investment and liability protections for good-faith participants.

III. Adaptive Capacity

8. Invest in real-time monitoring of attention saturation indicators. Crisis saturation is an exploit, not a byproduct. Governments should resource systematic tracking of when institutional bandwidth is being deliberately consumed.

9. Establish undersea cable repair as a treaty-level alliance commitment. Cable infrastructure is among the highest-leverage single-point vulnerabilities in SA-enabled conflict. A specific, time-bound repair capability standard should be a formal alliance commitment.

10. Fund and field narrative inoculation programs at scale. Pre-bunking campaigns, media literacy investments, and rapid-response counter-narrative capacity are proven partial mitigations to cognitive domain operations. These should be resourced comparably to kinetic defensive programs.

11. Institutionalize red-teaming for SA scenarios across government exercises. All national-level exercises should include SA threat scenarios covering synthetic media, AI-enabled influence operations, and coordinated attention saturation as standard components.

IV. Speed and Flexibility

12. Compress acquisition timelines for cyber and information-domain capabilities. Traditional defense procurement cycles are incompatible with the pace at which SA-relevant tools evolve. Modular Open Systems Approach principles should be mandated for relevant programs.

13. Pre-authorize emergency response authorities for information-domain attacks. The ambiguity of SA-enabled attacks is itself a strategic weapon. Governments should pre-define authority thresholds for response actions so that decision latency does not compound the effect of the initial attack.

14. Protect and resource the intelligence workforce as a strategic asset. Analytical capacity is a non-fungible component of synthetic resilience. Workforce disruption through sustained attrition or resource reduction degrades the early-warning function that is the first line of defense.

V. Democratic Resilience

15. Treat electoral infrastructure as critical national infrastructure. The 2024 Romanian election annulment illustrates that SA-enabled influence operations can produce legal and constitutional crises. Electoral systems require hardening-in-depth.

16. Establish governance frameworks for AI-generated content in the information space. Influence operations are a governance problem. Voluntary platform norms have not produced adequate accountability. Regulatory frameworks should require provenance disclosure for AI-generated political content at scale.

17. Build coalition consensus around democratic resilience as a collective defense obligation. Allies should formally affirm that systematic, state-directed information operations against democratic institutions constitute an act warranting collective response.

VI. International Architecture

18. Develop a layered attribution regime for SA-enabled attacks. Deniability is a structural feature of SA. International attribution frameworks should be extended to include AI-enabled influence operations, with graded response options tied to confidence levels.

19. Engage non-aligned states on SA risk as a shared governance challenge. The cost reduction that makes SA attractive to revisionist states also makes it accessible to non-state actors and fragile state proxies. Broader coalition-building on SA governance reduces the attack surface for all parties.

Download the Full Policy Brief

The ISRS Policy Agenda is available as a formatted document for circulation, citation, and briefing use.

Coming soon