Meet Nate
Nate Ostdiek, a senior in the department of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, served as a 2024 NSRI Strategic Deterrence Intern, working closely with NSRI Fellow Michell Black to execute a strategic culture assessment of adversarial deterrence conceptualizations. Focusing primarily on China, Nate’s team conducted novel research into how culturally driven cognitive behaviors and philosophies affect thinking and perceiving deterrence. Through open-source intelligence (OSINT) collection from Chinese web sources and military documents, the team was able to analyze the data utilizing the Cultural Topography Methodology. Thus, allowing them to identify critical culture factors and isolate their impact one specific question: How do U.S. adversaries think about deterrence?
Nate completed his work with NSRI’s internship by synthesizing his findings into an academic paper. Not only highlighting links between strategic culture and deterrence conceptualizations, but also testing the effectiveness of the Cultural Topography Methodology and, thus, catalyzing further insight into strategic deterrence overall.
Q&A
What did you learn from your time with NSRI?
NSRI has given me insights into the processes that drive modern defense as well as strengthening my ability to talk about related topics. My family has a long history of serving the Department of Defense (DOD) and other federal agencies in both a civilian and military capacity. I’m proud to continue that tradition.
What do your peers find most fascinating about your work with NSRI?
There have definitely been more questions about what the net war might look like, how likely it is to happen and what we can do to prevent it. It is really cool to tell friends and family that I’ve worked on a project for the DOD. I’ve had many long conversations about the importance of deterrence and applying it to smaller situations to demonstrate how it will scale up. I’ve also become "the guy" that all my friends pepper with questions about what’s happening in the world and how they can mentally and otherwise prepare themselves.
Overall, friends and peers are usually shocked that there is such a great opportunity in Nebraska to research national security. Although it can be a bit awkward because I can’t necessarily talk about the day-to-day the way others can with their jobs, it has strengthened my social ability to expand the conversation beyond work.
What sense of purpose do you feel from this work?
I feel a great sense of patriotism from the work I did. Deterrence allows us to keep the life we have and defend it from those who threaten it. I think the ultimate goal of this work is to help prevent the next catastrophe. Deterrence is about ensuring continued stability by mitigating threats before they start. This work has allowed me to look around my community and be grateful that it exists and is happy and safe.
Learn more about Nate's NSRI experience.
