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.

How Risk is Different in Strategic Competition

As the United States military embarks into strategic competition and orients its strategy to counter revisionist powers like China and Russia, it also faces a challenge within its ranks: no individual below the rank of colonel has experienced anything other than the war on terror, and yet these are the leaders of the next endeavor. For these commanders, strategic competition presents two operational extremes. The first is the daily contest where even routine actions could have significance for strategic messaging and relative advantage. Risk here is to the strategy of the U.S. and, relative to the military instrument of power, is the cumulative sum of the joint force’s daily actions and inactions. When considering the risk to strategy, the risks associated with inaction are generally the greater threat to military strategy compared to the risks associated with action, for as Schelling notes violence “is most successful when it is threatened and not used.”[4]

Never has the entering argument into the equation been a multipolar, thermo-nuclear world with opportunistic adversaries.

While cumulative actions could inevitably jeopardize a strategy—e.g., MacArthur ordering his commanders to advance towards the Yalu spurring the Chinese intervention in Korea in 1950[5]—the counter is cumulative inaction. Inaction is the only guarantee known to render a strategy ineffective due to the lack of perceived threat of violence. However, when considering the risks associated with action and inaction, when operating below the threshold of armed conflict, the military commander must also carefully consider the strategies of other instruments of power. Military inaction could be a means of buying down the risk to desired outcomes from other non-military instruments of national power that might be more necessary in the pursuit of the national interest in a given moment.

The other extreme strategic competition presents is war. While histories are replete with lessons learned for the military strategist, strategic competition is unique in two ways. Never has the entering argument into the equation been a multipolar, thermo-nuclear world with opportunistic adversaries. Here, the actions that enable deterrence can no longer be targeted at a singular adversary, but must simultaneously be targeted at a specific adversary and all current and possible future adversaries all at once. This calculus has long surpassed Tuckers’ prisoner’s dilemma of the Cold War.[6]

As if that were not enough, the U.S. military’s center of gravity for the past 30-years has been its command and control capability which required the dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum. Given the diminishing costs for its adversaries to disrupt the electro-magnetic spectrum, the U.S. has no choice but to adopt mission command, which requires “subordinate leaders at all echelons exercise disciplined initiative and act aggressively and independently to accomplish the mission.”[7] As a prerequisite for mission command to succeed, commanders at all levels must be able to directly correlate their individual actions to the effective implementation of a unified strategy. Further, they must all perceive risk in a similar manner for their independent decision making to be synergistic.

Risk in military operations, as determined by time, the priority of instruments of national power, and the imperatives of national strategy, ought to be defined much differently than current doctrine suggests. But, the U.S. military can fix this now. The U.S. military, recognizing how its understanding of risk is holding back its own commanders, should reconcile its efforts across the instruments of power.  

The Fallacies of “Risk to Mission” and “Risk to Force”

Risk to Mission

If commanders inherently apply the axiom “accept no unnecessary risk,” the reader begins to see the fault lines inherent to the term “risk to mission.” If a commander is briefed on a plan and they employ all the resources available within their authority, the risks associated with that mission have been reduced to the lowest possible level for the specified period of time. Other courses of action presented to the commander might appear to have different levels of risk, but they do not.

Commanders ought to concern themselves with more than risk to their mission. They must be cognizant of risk to the U.S. national interests by recognizing risk to partners and stakeholders involved in pursuing national strategies.

Inherent risk to the strategic enterprise is a fundamental constant that merely manifests differently as a function of varying the time horizon or by coordinating with other commanders to pool their resources into a singular effort. Every risk that remains across the range of plans considered and among the instruments of national power should be a necessary risk. Therefore, risk to this, or to any given mission is a static and irrelevant metric; it is an expected cost.[8] Commanders ought to concern themselves with more than risk to their mission. They must be cognizant of risk to the U.S. national interests by recognizing risk to partners and stakeholders involved in pursuing national strategies.

Competition below the threshold of armed conflict in the present time makes it all the more important that the U.S. military understands and supports the strategies and the risks faced by other instruments of power. Cost-benefit analyses are meaningless in isolation. In any given mission, military commanders must consider the critical costs and benefits to the plans of other stakeholders in national strategy. In many instances, the U.S. military has the capacity to accept risks that other stakeholders cannot, and if left unchecked, those unaccounted for risks could jeopardize the larger enterprise. Therefore, a broader conception of risks to strategies across stakeholders must be of the utmost concern.

Risk to Force

Commanders in the U.S. military are legally responsible for the readiness, discipline, and wellbeing of their personnel.[9] Under the assumption that commanders accept no unnecessary risk, given a set mission and bounded by a specified period of time, risk to force should be reduced down to the lowest level possible. Vary the time horizon by which one bounds risk—e.g., changing the mission type from a seizure to a raid, or adding in supporting commanders’ resources—and the risk to one’s forces can be reduced below what the commander could accomplish organically. By this logic, risk to force is a mere datum, a set value moderated by probability, to be used in a cost-benefit analysis to consider action versus action.

One must consider if the opposite is true: is there a time where the risk could be too high not to pursue an activity? Without considering this counterpoint, if ever a risk is defined as unacceptable, then that key terrain in the adversary’s mind has been lost; they know where you will not go.

In executing their legal responsibility to protect their personnel, most commanders, especially those only considering risk to their mission and risk to their force rather than the risk to stakeholders and the risk to the national capability to wage war, as strategic competition necessitates, will err conservatively and myopically in only considering risk to their force. The U.S. military’s risk analysis manual would support them using this nascent aperture: it defines unacceptable risk as one that is “too high to pursue a desired activity without additional risk mitigation efforts.”[10] One must consider if the opposite is true: is there a time where the risk could be too high not to pursue an activity? Without considering this counterpoint, if ever a risk is defined as unacceptable, then that key terrain in the adversary’s mind has been lost; they know where you will not go. The Pandora’s Box that is deterrence is no longer an abyss.

While the commander never abrogates their legal responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of their personnel, commanders must account for their relative priority as merely a component of the military instrument of power. They must concern themselves over the risk to national capability to wage war. It is a unique and perhaps rare instance that theirs is a single point of failure within the military instrument of power. Jimmy Doolittle exemplified the fallacy of risk to force in his raid on Tokyo, where he launched his squadron expecting a nearly 100% casualty rate. Despite the substantial and highly probable costs his squadron would pay on his mission, Doolittle piloted the first aircraft into the air. After all, his squadron consisted of only 16 of the 9,816 B-25s the U.S. built in World War II.[11] The complete loss of a statistically insignificant warfighting capability on a mission that would change the adversary’s strategic calculus was not a risk; it was an essential task at an acceptable cost. Thus, the mature, complementary commander in strategic competition is biased to accepts risks,[12] or rather, stewards and competes in support of their nation’s strategies, using their people and resources for which they are legally responsible, each and every day, to gain a cumulative advantage.

A Faulty Framework for Risk Decisions

The Joint Chiefs’ manual provides that risk can be accepted, avoided, reduced, or transferred.[13] While this aligns with business management theory, it is nonetheless problematic and indicative of America’s strategic myopia, which lacks a common vernacular between stakeholders to discuss risks and leads to coherent national strategies that are bogged down by short-term inter-governmental maneuvering at the cost of strategic intra-government maneuvering. Strategic competition is an infinite game that operates under constraints and forces that are distinct from those affecting business strategy. Contrary to a world where decision makers often focus on maximizing profits over the omnipresent yet arbitrary time horizon that is the quarter, strategic competition’s goal is to perpetuate the game at all costs.[14]

The sudden appearance of a new strategic risk does not mean that our adversaries have created more risk. Rather, they have successfully unlocked and transferred some of their risks to the U.S.

Through this lens, the U.S., as well as its adversaries, are all part of a global system of actors who are indefinitely competing to protect their own interests. All actions, and inactions, have repercussions that transfer risk throughout the system. “Mitigating” or “avoiding” risks are merely forms of transferring the risk, either to our partners to include other instruments of power, our adversaries, or our future selves. A small risk avoided today is added to a small risk in the future to create a larger cumulative risk. When mitigating risk by, for example, buying a new weapon system to counter an emerging adversary capability, the risk is actually transferred; a hard to quantify military risk becomes a projected economic cost which, in turn, imposes a risk into the economic system.

The sudden appearance of a new strategic risk does not mean that our adversaries have created more risk. Rather, they have successfully unlocked and transferred some of their risks to the U.S. Therefore, in the cumulative world that is strategic competition, where commanders could be isolated and executing on mission type orders, it is critical for all commanders, from the combatant commander to the lowest level officer in charge, to have a common perception of how their actions or inactions will displace risk and, most importantly, consider how and when that risk will be transferred back to the U.S. Only through adopting a common perception of risk in a system, like those proposed in this article, will American military commanders gain a decision advantage across the extremes of conflict that strategic competition presents.

Measuring What Matters

I have summarized why the foundations of the U.S. military’s risk management framework are fatally flawed. There are two lodestars that the next revision of the Joint Chiefs’ manual on risk analysis must incorporate: precision and scope. These elements support more precisely and comprehensively structuring the concept of risk for any commander and across stakeholders. Despite best practices outlined in modern research—such as Tetlock and Gardner’s Superforecasting, or Gutman and Goldmeier’s Becoming a Data Head—the Joint Chiefs’ manual still uses an antiquated scale of “highly unlikely” (~0-20%) “unlikely” (~21-50%) “likely” (~51-80%) and “very likely” (~81-100%) to articulate risks.[15] And yes, the ~ is used in the source document.

This scale encourages human performance mediocrity by fostering a culture of incomplete problem analysis. The measures are too blunt to wield, giving those on the receiving end of the data no perceptible means to continue problem solving by arguing with the data presented to them. This scale obscures relevant indicators of a problem and, even if identified, does not leverage these critical factors to inform decision making. A minute change in a critical factor should carry more weight than an ~20-30% change in a less-relevant indicator, contrary to what the current manual would suggest. This can have critical repercussions when an adversary is maneuvering for positional advantage or is attempting to deliver strategic messaging to the U.S. With such wide bands to articulate risk, the U.S. military could perceive an adversary’s strategic messaging as normal indications or, as an adversary maneuvers for relative advantage, the U.S. could hide their activity for them with the ~20–30% bands currently used to assess risk.

But for risk to be measured accurately, more is needed than just an illuminating snapshot. The temporal and cumulative nature of risk is equally important. This is especially true in strategic competition, where our adversaries will desire to compete below the U.S. threshold of armed conflict. This is why adding a time horizon is especially important for the U.S. military.

Commanders at all levels, who typically serve between two and three years, even if they perceive a long-term cumulative risk, have no incentive to make decisions based on cumulative risks beyond their tenure.

The purpose of the U.S. military adopting this new risk dimension is twofold. First, one must look out further than one’s strategy to understand its consequences. This is because, as international affairs expert George Friedman would advocate, the solution to today’s problem is likely the genesis of one’s future problem.[16] Second, this time horizon is important to conduct a cumulative and weighted assessment of risk. However, just as there is a drawback to saying some risks are “unacceptable,” there are drawbacks to bounding and defining a time horizon. One’s adversaries could simply temporally outmaneuver the artificial horizon. But the problem today is greater and necessitates some temporal boundary.

Commanders at all levels, who typically serve between two and three years, even if they perceive a long-term cumulative risk, have no incentive to make decisions based on cumulative risks beyond their tenure. Without a temporal horizon, the U.S. military lacks a forcing function to demand commanders consider and take actions today based on cumulative risks. Unless the U.S. military changes the way it perceives risk, it is at risk of ceding strategic initiative to its most dangerous adversaries because its temporal frames are too limited.

So how far out should the U.S. instruments of power look? Certainly, a 100-year plan is infeasible as the fidelity of one’s assessments diminishes the further into the future one forecasts–another reason it is necessary to start with the precise measures mentioned above. The value of temporally bounding risk assessment by standardizing a distant yet perceptible future comes in analyzing the right information over time and using that to make informed predictions about how risk will be transferred in the future. At the strategic level, more important than the probability of individual events occurring is the probability that variables will be in play. Put another way, I do not care exactly who my opponent is a decade or more into the future, but I desire to know that, as a rational actor, any future opponent is likely bound by certain geo-political constraints which I can predict today. If, however, a temporal horizon is set too distant where the fidelity of relevant variables becomes opaque, regardless of the precision of the current measures of relevant information, then this risk assessment methodology loses all value.

Conclusions

In 2016, just as the U.S. military was pivoting towards strategic competition, the DoD released its first manual on risk. This attempt at codifying risk analysis is as wrong as it is comfortably conventional. In measuring risk to force and risk to mission, this risk assessment methodology subverts the very strategies it is presumed to support. It nascently considers the risks to one’s immediate forces relative to a mission only considered in isolation with scant regard for the future operating environment. This understanding of risk is hindering decision making and will, over time, contribute to strategic failure. That is, unless the U.S. military changes now.

Adopting the risk methodology I prescribe here is foundational to such a change. However, it requires the military institutions to comprehend systems theory as a basis to enable mission command, and to adopt holistic precision and a proper temporal horizon in perceiving and mitigating risk. Only with precise measurement of critical information, nested within a system, can one begin to access patterns. And, only by defining a temporal horizon that is sufficient for strategic competition, can the significance of those patterns be exposed for what they really are. Then and only then, when this understanding of the adversary is comprehensive, can military commanders and stakeholders across the instruments of power, from the strategic down to the disaggregated and perhaps isolated tactical elements, make appropriate and informed risk decisions now and into the future. With this clarity, mission command becomes a weapon, a desired way to fight rather than another self-imposed doctrinal obstacle.

Neils Abderhalden is an officer in the United States Air Force and a student at Air Command and Staff College. He has numerous deployments in support of overseas contingency operations. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: Major General Chris Donahue, commander of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division, XVIII Airborne Corps, boards a C-17 cargo plane at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. August 30, 2021 (Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett).

Notes:

[1] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Manual (CJCSM) 3105.01A, “Joint Risk Analysis Methodology,” (October 2021), https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Library/Manuals/CJCSM%203105.01A.pdf?ver=y3cH4s5UNyqJAXwxAYCL5Q%3d%3d.

[2] Ibid., C-4.

[3] Ibid., B-1.

[4] Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 10.

[5] Thomas Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from WWII to Today (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2012), 129-132.

[6] S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25, untitled http://www.amadae.com/Amadae__Prisoners_of_Reason__Prisoners_Dilemma.pdf.

[7] Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Innovative Examples: Exercising Mission Command through Memoranda of Understanding,” (March 2015): 2, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/CORe/1503_White_Paper_MOU.pdf.

[8] A more suitable term for “risk to mission” as the DoD uses it would be “probability of accomplishing mission objectives.” This is a separate matter that pertains to the cost-benefit analysis of action vs inaction of a specific mission and is an important matter when considering how risk is transferring throughout time and space.

[9] Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Joint Publication 1: Doctrine of the Armed Forces of the United States, Change 1,”(July 2017): II-12, IV-18, IV-21, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp1_ch1.pdf.

[10] CJCSM 3105.01A, “Joint Risk Analysis Methodology,” B-7.

[11] “North American B-25B Mitchell,” National Museum of the United States Air Force, accessed 10 Feb 2022, https://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/Visit/Museum-Exhibits/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/196310/north-american-b-25b-mitchell/.

[12] Office of the Chairman, “Innovative Examples,” 2.

[13] CJCSM 3105.01A, “Joint Risk Analysis Methodology,” B-1.

[14] Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game (London, England: Penguin, 2019).

[15] CJCSM 3105.01A, “Joint Risk Analysis Methodology,” B-5.

[16] George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (Harpswell, ME: Anchor, 2009).