OPSEC and Risk Mitigation in Action: Tracing the Origin and Viewing the Future
Samuel V. Crouse, OCP
“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.” - Ronald Reagan
I. Introduction
Today’s leaders are faced with unique opportunities in the area of information accessibility. The electronic age, the internet and shared networks supply them with an almost endless supply of data with the additional feature of real time or near real time updates. While information accessibility is a quantum leap over what previous generations had available, the analysis side of the equation becomes increasingly more complex. Processes that refine and sort information for the decision making task of leaders need to respond to this increased supply of information or bottlenecks and “analysis paralysis” can and will develop. It is important for leaders and managers to make decisions efficiently and effectively. This is true in the area of risk mitigation, ultimately the subject of this paper.
This paper examines the history and origin OPSEC (Operations Security) and the basic five step model. The steps are compared and contrasted with the DoD program protection process in order to learn more about the importance of identifying critical program information, threats and vulnerabilities; these elements are considered in the risk mitigation steps of both processes. More can be learned about risk mitigation, the highly cognitive portion of the task, by discovering the nature of factual decisions. This facet is examined in detail and compared with recent literature on decision making, a vital component of the problem solving associated with risk mitigation.
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