24 April 2015

FIXES FOR RISK ASSESSMENT IN DEFENSE

April 22, 2015

As I recently argued here at War on the Rocks, many of the current Defense Department approaches to risk and risk management could stand an overhaul. In discussions on national security, risk is frequently not well defined, and is often used for purposes (sufficiency and threat analyses) better served by other components of strategy. Too often, risk frameworks generate ambiguous, color-coded assessments grounded in subjective analyses.

In order to build a better model, we need to define the type of choices we’re dealing with. The purpose of such a model is not to address narrow, largely deterministic issues that have something close to a right answer — like how to organize guards at an airport for maximum efficiency and coverage, an issue, which could be solved with an actual equation.

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