A Value-Focused Approach to Energy Transformation in the United States Department of Defense

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has identified its energy requirements as a key vulnerability and in recent years has taken substantial initiatives to improve its energy profile. As part of this process, DoD leaders have issued guidance documents outlining goals and objectives relating to energy. These documents are intended to inform many different decisions at strategic, managerial, and operational levels. They specify a wide range of objectives that overlap only partially, while identical terms appear in many documents, but with inconsistent definitions. In this paper, we review 44 strategic guidance documents and apply a value-focused thinking approach to identify and define explicitly a comprehensive set of common objectives for energy decisions in the DoD. The objectives and associated definitions are intended to facilitate horizontal and vertical communication within the DoD. In addition, the objectives we define suggest possible metrics that may be comparable across services and in some cases may be aggregated across organizational levels.