Defense Threat Reduction Agency: Consequence Management Assessment Framework

Since the Cold War, the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks by rogue nations and terrorist groups have increased, thus causing the United States and its partner nations (PN) to devote more attention and resources to crisis and consequence management. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is the Department of Defense's (DoD) official combat support agency for countering weapons of mass destruction that include chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high explosive weapons (Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 2007). Within DTRA is the Consequence Management Assistance Program (CMAP), the DoD's primary consequence management program for the US' Partner Nations (PN). Currently CMAP has an unreliable metric system that fails to provide meaningful analysis to show definitive improvement in measured areas. This research used value focused thinking to create a framework that effectively analyzes a PN's capacity and capability to deal with consequence management. The framework provides CMAP the ability to compare data over time and track PN progress. It allows the user to generate recommendations for the DoD on PN resource allocation in order to further develop their consequence management abilities and nurture international relations.