management at its most imperative. Achieving success means obtaining mission assurance. Missing the mark can mean mission failure as well as human and material losses. For critical infrastructure protection, risk management requires leveraging resources to address the most critical infrastructure assets that are also the most vulnerable and that have the greatest threat exposure. The most important part of the CIP lifecycle is Phase 1. Because it is crucial to target the right assets for infrastructure protection, determining these assets is the first phase in the CIP life cycle. This phase, Analysis and Assessment, is the key and foundation of the seven lifecycle activities. Without a solid foundation, the remaining CIP life cycle phases may be flawed, resulting in a CIP plan that fails to protect the critical infrastructure and, therefore, mission assurance. Phase 1: Analysis and Assessment Phase 1 determines what assets are important, and identifies their vulnerabilities, and dependencies so that decision makers have the information they need to make effective risk management choices. The Defense Infrastructure, or DI, is organized into ten sectors. Each sector is composed of assets, such as systems, programs, people, equipment, or facilities. Assets may be simple, such as one facility within one geographic location, or complex, involving geographically dispersed links and nodes. The Analysis and Assessment is made up of five steps that include activities that span and encompass the ten DI sectors and their assets. I. The first step in the Analysis and Assessment phase is to identify critical assets. An asset's criticality is a function of both time and situation based on the asset's operational or business value. For the DI, value depends on several factors: First, what military operations or services rely on an asset and how those dependencies change across time Next, how sensitive the operation is to the loss or compromise of the asset, in other words what is the maximum allowable down time if the asset is compromised. Finally, what the asset's assurance profile is, in particular whether asset restoration or a switch to a backup can occur within the allowable down time. Through domain expertise and inspection, critical assets are identified and then reported to the CIP Program. II. The second step of the Analysis and Assessment phase is Defense Infrastructure characterization. This step maps and associates critical asset functions and relationships within a DI sector. III. The third step in the Analysis and Assessment