Improving Metrics for the Department of Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (2012) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 3-10
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From page 3... ...
As a result, the committee concludes that it is possible to successfully accomplish what is easily measurable and still fail in the engagement. 1 The CTR Program began in 1991 as a means of assisting the former Soviet Union and later additional countries with strategic offensive arms elimination; nuclear warhead dismantlement; nuclear weapons storage security; chemical weapons destruction; biological weapons proliferation prevention; reactor core conversions; nuclear material protection, control and accounting; export control initiatives; defense conversion; as well as other projects.
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From page 4... ...
The DoD Metrics Report contains reasonable metrics for the CTR programs that consolidate and eliminate weapons and weapons materials,2 and contains a solid starting point for developing metrics for the newer capacity-building programs. For meaningful evaluation, the committee assessed that DoD must (1)
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From page 5... ...
• The DoD Metrics Report deliberately does not consider future missions or changes in objectives, and for some programs it does not take into consideration or explicitly discuss planned and unplanned change over time. Projects have different phases that make different kinds of progress toward the program's impact and effectiveness.
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From page 6... ...
The committee judges that using a consistent framework to prioritize and refine metrics within a program would help DoD and other CTR decision 6 It may not be possible to directly measure the higher-level outcomes from some CTR program's or project's performance, even with the best metrics. For example, DoD may never know how many illegal shipments were not interdicted at a border crossing assisted by a CTR program, or how many patients sick with an illness of interest did not go to the hospital.
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From page 7... ...
The United States Agency for International Development operates capacity building programs with partners across the world to foster democratic institutions and has had to develop metrics for these hard-to-measure efforts. The DoD Defense Security Cooperation program also shares important similarities with the DoD CTR Program and may in some cases serve as a model.
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From page 8... ...
Government decision makers need this information to ensure that project resources are achieving the program objectives. DoD and the partner country can also use this information to signal the need to develop and implement corrective action plans so resources can be better utilized or reallocated, if progress is not satisfactory.
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From page 9... ...
The increases in budget and scope to date, as well as the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, indicate that CBEP is a growing priority to the Administration and DoD's involvement reflects a conscious choice to use DoD to carry out this mission because of its experience with biodefense research and its experience working on threat reduction programs. Critics may dispute these decisions, and can legitimately point out that difficulties in developing reliable direct metrics for the program's impact and effectiveness increase the programmatic risks of the program, but mixing these issues with questions about the metrics themselves confuses matters and makes it more difficult to make progress in the program and in the debate about the program.
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From page 10... ...
10 IMPROVING METRICS FOR THE DOD CTR PROGRAM network that is exercised regularly to maintain an on-going relationship with no defined end date. These visions appear mutually exclusive, but there are different phases to capacity building programs: the initial phase may involve intensive efforts and capital expenditures.
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