This book examines the role of risk management in the recent financial crisis and applies lessons from there to the national security realm. It rethinks the way risk contributes to strategy, with insights relevant to practitioners and scholars in national security as well as business. Over the past few years, the concept of risk has become one of the most commonly discussed issues in national security planning. And yet the experiences of the 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated critical limitations in institutional efforts to control risk. The most elaborate and complex risk procedures could not cure skewed incentives, cognitive biases, groupthink, and a dozen other human factors that led companies to take excessive risk. By embracing risk management, the national security enterprise may be turning to a discipline just as it has been discredited.

Michael J. Mazarr is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, USA. The author of 12 books, he has been a professor and dean at the National War College, USA, a special assistant to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), USA, and a defense aide on Capitol Hill.

1. Risk, Judgment and Uncertainty.- 2. Defining Risk.- 3. Approaches to Risk in National Security.- 4. Risk and Uncertainty.- 5. Risk is What We Make of It.- 6. Indifferent to Consequences.- 7. The Swans to Worry About Are Gray.- 8. Risk Becomes Personalized.- 9. What You Don't Know Can Destroy You: Ignorance and Correlated Risk.- 10. Risk, Incentives and Culture.- 11. The Role of Risk in Strategy.- 12. Outcome Assessment of the Emerging U.S. National Security Strategy.- 13. Principles of Effective Risk Management.- 14. Managing Uncertainty.