Given the multitude of WIMP candidates and search strategies, it is imperative to develop theoretical formalism to delineate the possible interactions of dark matter with known particles, making clear which uncertainties are inherently model dependent and which can, at least in principle, be improved by further Standard Model analysis. This involves a careful treatment of physics at multiple scales, ranging the few-TeV WIMP mass, the electroweak scale, and the nucleon mass. In this talk, we describe effective field theory framework that capitalizes on these scale separations to identify universal features in WIMP interactions associated with Standard Model physical scales.