T his study offers a utility framework to identify assets for deployment into humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) operations. We focus on attributes of the hard assets: capabilities for humanitarian missions, proximity to the affected area, and cost to the organization. We demonstrate the importance of this framework using the case of the United States Navy (USN). On a broader level, we offer a strategy for the decision makers to deploy appropriate assets for executing HADR smartly. Such a method, when employed with relevant data, can enhance efficiency for various organizations involved in HADR, whether military or not. We collected a large amount of data on the assets, specifically ships, of the USN. This collected data alone are a contribution to the literature. We use factor analysis to reduce the dimensionality and make the dataset manageable while simultaneously retaining the variation and maximal information in the data. Our results, in this case, show that planners need to consider costs to truly maximize utility, especially in cases where two assets, or a combination of them, have similar utility ratings but significantly different costs. Our findings also demonstrate that asset capabilities, proximity, and the duration of an HADR response matter. Finally, we employ our framework to illustrate how HADR responses to the 2010 Haiti and 2011 Tohoku earthquakes could have been conducted more effectively and efficiently.