Risk management for future military forces: Mapping asymmetric hazards

In the early 1990s the Army set the goal of incorporating risk management into all Army programs and processes. The first step in the formal risk management process is to create a list of hazards. The second step is to assess the risk associated with each hazard. The ideal outcome is a perfectly prioritized list of the most dangerous hazards. As this is not often possible, we offer the ‘fuzzy risk map’. Decision-makers can use the risk map as a forum for discussing the relative dangers. This will assist in prioritizing the rest of the risk management process (decisions and actions). The hazard list generated for this paper is short and incomplete. Its primary purpose is to demonstrate the use of the risk map. The paper recommends a more formal hazard generation process, based on challenging the assumptions of how we think we will conduct military operations in the future. Other risk reduction suggestions include an emphasis on redundancy, the use of conservative estimates, and a wider base of scenarios.