STRATEGIC CULTURE AS A STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINT ON MILITARY-POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES: COUNTERFACTUAL APPROACH

<jats:p>The article provides a conceptual and theoretical analysis of strategic culture as a mechanism of structural limitation of military-political alternatives in the process of strategic decision-making. Unlike widespread interpretations in which strategic culture is viewed primarily as a system of symbolic representations or an interpretative matrix of security thinking, the study substantiates its functioning as a complex of normative and institutional filters that determine the boundaries of what is politically permissible even before the beginning of formal rational analysis. Based on the combination of the counterfactual approach and the process tracing methodology, the mechanism of pre-analytical selection of military-strategic alternatives is reconstructed, demonstrating that a significant proportion of potentially possible escalation scenarios are excluded from the strategic agenda not because of technical inefficiency, but due to their cultural, moral, or institutional inadmissibility. A model of the structural functioning of strategic culture is proposed, encompassing the interconnection between the strategic community, normative-value orientations, and mechanisms for the selection of alternatives. Four basic filters of strategic limitation are identified: cognitive, normative, strategic, and institutional, each of which influences the formation of the field of admissible decisions in the sphere of security and defense. It is demonstrated that strategic culture not only shapes the logic of threat interpretation, but also determines the limits of the legitimate use of force, the level of acceptable escalation, and the nature of military-political self-restraint of states. Within the framework of counterfactual analysis, the case of Operation Duck Hook (1968) is reconsidered, making it possible to show that the United States’ refusal to use tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam was determined primarily by the institutionalized “nuclear taboo” as an element of strategic culture rather than solely by the risk of geopolitical escalation. A comparative analysis of democratic and authoritarian strategic communities demonstrates that in democratic systems strategic culture performs the function of limiting escalation scenarios, whereas in authoritarian regimes it may transform into a mechanism for legitimizing coercive practices and expanding the spectrum of admissible military-political decisions. Particular attention is devoted to the prospects of using algorithmic modeling and artificial intelligence systems of the RLHF type as instruments for the empirical verification of the causal role of strategic culture through the simulation of “culturally neutral” decision-making scenarios. This makes it possible to consider strategic culture not merely as a theoretical construct, but also as a measurable factor in contemporary security policy and military-strategic forecasting.</jats:p>