Resilience Metrics: Lessons from Military Doctrines

In Brief Escalating damages associated with international catastrophes, such as Hurricane Sandy and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Meltdown, have spurred the Office of the President to release Executive Orders that direct government agencies to enhance national preparedness and resilience. However, there has been a struggle to comply with these directives as there is limited guidance on how to measure and design resilient systems. As a further challenge, the Defense Science Board states that resilience metrics must be focused, yet generalized, in order to be applied across cyber, defense, and energy systems in the Department of Defense and other agencies. We assert that metrics of resilience in the literature often fail due to existing conceptual issues that reduce their use, including the conflation of risk and resilience, and the necessity of reconciling engineering and ecological resilience definitions and objectives. We explain these conceptual issues and discuss military doctrine required to support the development of metrics that meet government agency needs. Furthermore, we provide a list of example metrics that overcome these barriers, and can be used across systems. Key Concepts