Implications of intelligence engineering: Designing intelligence diplomacy through game theory, reinforcement learning, and metaheuristic algorithms

OpenAlex · English

Considering today's geopolitical conditions, the risks of war and global transformation increasingly highlight the importance of intelligence. Intelligence diplomacy has become a critical component of national security and foreign policy processes. Intelligence diplomacy, an attempt to reduce conflicts and wars by shaping diplomacy through intelligence activities, rather than conflicts themselves, strives to utilize not only the social sciences but also all the instruments of the field. The primary objective of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of this field, along with its first application, by conducting an application in the field of "intelligence engineering," a recently discussed need for which has not yet been implemented in practice. This study designed a game theory-based engineering problem by developing a successful decision algorithm to gain an advantage over adversaries in an intelligence-based diplomacy case. Engineering methods such as artificial intelligence, heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms, and pattern-based analysis were utilized in generating these decision alternatives. Furthermore, a simulation structure consisting of 1000 games, including 75,000 iterations determined through parameter optimization, was constructed and run to investigate which strategy, and therefore which engineering approach, yielded the most successful results. However, the real significance of the study is that it provides evidence in the literature that the concept of "intelligence engineering" is not a utopian approach but a feasible systematic approach, through the first academic application of engineering-oriented scientific and "objective" approaches in intelligence science, instead of traditional social science-oriented "subjective" approaches.