FMEA Countermeasures Analysis

Often an operation at sea such as piracy has a sequence of key events. Certain processes require a critical sequence, interrelationship and necessary time for initiation and completion of each function. Risk mitigation and risk management involves an agile process of understanding the sequence of processes and systematically breaking causal chains and reducing the awareness of the pirates and their capabilities to coordinate over-the-horizon operations. Creating functional delays and disrupting the decision cycle and its synchronization with the overall key processes become an attractive means of breaking or inhibiting the causal chain. For the purposes of this discussion a causal chain infers sequence and order - one event must occur before another or in conjunction with another sequence of otherwise independent activities and in a specified sequence of actions, providing a momentum for the success of the perpetrator or defender.

FMEA can provide an orderly process to analyze each step along a sequence of steps necessary to gain an end game or condition. Where several independent but parallel activities are necessary in the evolution, FMEA provides a side by side perspective of multiple functions and activities through te use of a timeline.

FMEA assigns relative weights to the degree of risk along each step of a critical sequence of functions. This assists the risk analyst in determining the best payoffs in time and place of intervention to break the causal chain.