Abstract
Toward the end of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)—the primary long-term strategy document issued by the U.S. Department of Defense— there appears the “Chairman’s Assessment,” a comment on the document by the senior-most officer in the U.S. military (at the time, Army General Martin Dempsey). The federal statute mandating the QDR states that it must be conducted “in consultation with” the Chairman, and requires that the Chairman’s office produce a formal assessment. Over time, the Chairman’s comment has come to focus on the risks embodied in and taken by the defense strategy laid out in the QDR.
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Notes
U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review2014 (Washington, DC: DoD, 2014), 61–62.
John Adams, Risk (London: Routledge, 1995), 8.
Douglas W. Hubbard, The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 8.
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United States Department of Homeland Security, Risk Management Fundamentals (Washington, DC: DHS, April 2011), 7.
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James G. March and Zur Shapira, “Managerial Perspectives on Risk and Risk Taking,” Management Science, Vol. 33, No. 11 (November 1987), 1405–1407.
The noted scholar Philip Tetlock has for several years conducted ground-breaking experiments into the ways in which groups of forecasters, using sophisticated analytical techniques and engaging in rigorous updating as new information becomes available, can significantly improve the success rate of probabilistic estimates; see Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (New York: Crown, 2015). I will make reference to Tetlock’s work in a number of places, but even he admits the fundamental distinction between “clockline” and “cloudlike” issues, and Notes carefully that the more uncertain and nonlinear a question is, the less accurate the forecasters can be. In this study I am interested in precisely the sort of complex strategic judgments that are largely immune to accurate anticipation—and that characterize a majority of the biggest decisions made by senior officials in government and business.
See, for example, Mark Blyth, “Coping with the Black Swan: The Unsettling World of Nassim Taleb,” Critical Review, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2009), 448–449.
Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, in a thoughtful recent treatment of systemic risk, make the point that increasing global complexity and interaction is making uncertainty even more intense—and making it even more difficult to use probabilistic forms of risk management. Analyzing risk in terms of identifiable, quantifiable outcomes demands a clear view of causalities, and this is becoming more and more difficult. The “specification of contingencies,” they argue, becomes “progressively more difficult as transport, communication, and financial and other world systems become increasingly integrated. This is because we start to lose sight of the effects of individual actions, introducing uncertainty and hazard.” See Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 26–27.
Yaacov Vertzberger, “Rethinking and Reconceptualizing Risk in Foreign Policy Decision-Making: A Sociocognitive Approach,” Political Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 2 (June 1995), 351.
For a classic example specifically dealing with subjective probability, see Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness,” Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 3 (1972). 430–454.
Jack Dowie, “Against Risk,” Risk Decision and Policy, Vol. 4 (1999). 57–73.
Jack Dowie, “Communication for Better Decisions: Not about ‘Risk,’” Health, Risk and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999), 41.
Jack Dowie, “A Risky Decision: Managing without Risk,” Risk Management, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2000), 55.
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Mazarr, M.J. (2016). Defining Risk. In: Rethinking Risk in National Security. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-91843-0_2
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