Risk Hindered Decision Making: How the DoD’s Faulty Understanding of Risk Jeopardizes its Strategy
By Neils J. Abderhalden
March 12, 2022U.S. Army photo by MSGT Alex Burnett
The current risk analysis manual from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff could be reduced, without much consequence, to a CliffsNotes version: “Accept no unnecessary risk.”[1] Out of 49 pages, this axiom is the only guidance worth taking forward. The rest of the manual consists of legacy terms or fallacies—like “risk to mission” and “risk to force—that not only serve no purpose in strategic competition but, if carried forward, will undermine the national security of the U.S.[2]
This article contests the U.S. military’s current risk framework and provides an initial vector for how to consider risk in strategic competition. In doing so I also dismantle the U.S. military’s nascent risk actions: accept, avoid, reduce, and transfer.[3] Using systems theory as a foundation, I illustrate how risk cannot be created or destroyed but can be accepted in its current state or transferred to another state. Finally, I recommend two revisions to the way the U.S. military measures risk to better derive clarity for commanders: increasing the precision of measurements and expanding the temporal scope to better assess cumulative risks.
This new comprehension of risk is the first step to achieving what the Chairman’s manual could not: a common framework for risk analysis that is applicable from the strategic to the tactical levels of war and across the spectrum of conflict, from competition to all-out war. In achieving this scope, the framework this article proposes is applicable to all instruments of power, which would enable the U.S. to more effectively communicate and coordinate strategic actions across all stakeholders.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/03/12/risk_hindered_decision_making_how_the_dods_faulty_understanding_of_risk_jeopardizes_its_strategy_821410.html
