During the U.S. military's first 145 years, waterborne and other infectious diseases caused more casualties than battlefield injuries, underscoring the importance of clean drinking water to military success. Ensuring drinking water safety poses special challenges to the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, because treatment equipment used in the conventional Army is too heavy and operationally complex to deploy to remote outposts. Due to the lack of purpose-built water purifiers, Special Forces often rely on commercial-off-the-shelf systems, but guidelines on selecting optimal systems for specific deployment contexts are lacking. To fill this gap, this research examines whether multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) can provide an operational framework for selecting water purifiers for Special Forces. Our objectives are to apply MCDA to help an officer preparing for village stability operations in Afghanistan select a water purifier and to assess whether other Army stakeholders agree with the officer's choice. In addition, because previous research has suggested that alternative MCDA methods can yield different rankings of decision alternatives, we test whether the MCDA method used is as important as who conducts the ranking. Toward these objectives, we use 4 MCDA approaches for eliciting preferences among 4 water purifiers from the deploying officer and 6 other Army stakeholders. The results show that regardless of method, the officer and 5 of the 6 stakeholders identified the same preferred alternative, although rankings for the less preferred water purifiers varied by method (intermethod rank-order correlation = .57). In responses to survey questions, stakeholders indicated that they would support using the results to support decisions about water purifier acquisition (average support = 5.3 on a 0–6 Likert scale with 6 indicating strongest support).

中文翻译：

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用于远程军事哨所的小型净水器：多准则决策分析的新应用

在美军的第一个145年中，水源性传染病和其他传染病造成的人员伤亡超过战场上的伤亡，这突显了洁净饮用水对军事成功的重要性。确保饮用水安全对美国陆军特种作战部队构成特殊挑战，因为常规陆军中使用的处理设备太重且操作复杂，无法部署到偏远哨所。由于缺乏专用的净水器，特种部队经常依赖现成的系统，但是缺乏针对特定部署环境选择最佳系统的指南。为了填补这一空白，本研究检查了多标准决策分析（MCDA）是否可以为选择特种部队的净水器提供操作框架。我们的目标是应用MCDA来帮助准备在阿富汗进行村庄稳定行动的军官选择净水器，并评估其他陆军利益相关者是否同意该军官的选择。此外，由于先前的研究表明替代的MCDA方法可以产生不同的决策替代方案排名，因此我们测试了所使用的MCDA方法是否与谁进行排名同样重要。为了实现这些目标，我们使用4种MCDA方法在部署官员和其他6个陆军利益相关者的4个净水器中引起偏好。结果表明，尽管采用哪种方法，该官员和6个利益相关者中的5个都确定了相同的首选替代方案，尽管次优净水器的排名因方法而异（方法间等级相关性= 0.57）。