A common perspective among U.S. interagency partners today is that any step towards more effective and coordinated responses to contemporary security challenges requires an improved and shared understanding of the nature of the conflict and the environment in which it exists or may potentially emerge. They also agree that this requires both a joint interagency process for conducting the assessment and a common conceptual framework to guide the collection and analysis of information. In October 2008, an interagency committee officially adopted the Interagency Conflict Assessment Framework...