Bernard Fox

A congressionally mandated review of the proposed restructuring of Air Force Materiel Command examined the proposal and its effect on life-cycle management, weapon system sustainment, and overall support to the warfighter. It also presents process improvement options to improve warfighter support and product development/support system design and operations support efficiencies, and it suggests organizational changes to facilitate their implementation.

Cyber mission thread analysis (CMTA), which identifies mission-critical systems in a cyber threat environment, requires a disciplined, well-planned process for its execution. This report provides a proposed planning and implementation guide (1) to perform CMTA expeditiously while still giving results good enough to make decisions about mission criticality, and (2) to analyze multiple missions concurrently.

An important consideration when deciding to mitigate or accept a risk from a cyber attack to a weapon system is how it affects operational missions. To analyze mission impact, the authors propose a methodology that aims to achieve two goals: to be comprehensive enough to be executed at the scale of each of the missions in the U.S. Air Force yet simple enough to be updated as needed to guide decisions to accept or to mitigate specific risks.

Air Force activities to ensure resiliency to adversarial cyber operations are somewhat fractionated, with blurred lines of authority and no overall coordinating mechanisms to ensure that all related activities are identified, tasked, and implemented and act in concert to achieve enterprise objectives. The authors recommend better ways to manage, at the enterprise level, efforts to ensure resiliency of missions to adversarial cyber operations.

This report presents a framework for the development of metrics--and a method for scoring them--that indicates how well a U.S. Air Force mission or system is expected to perform in a cyber-contested environment. There are two types of cyber metrics: working-level metrics to counter an adversary's cyber operations and institutional-level metrics to capture any cyber-related organizational deficiencies.

There is increasing concern that Air Force systems containing information technology are vulnerable to intelligence exploitation and offensive attack through cyberspace. In this report, the authors analyze how the Air Force acquisition/life-cycle management community can improve cybersecurity throughout the life cycle of its military systems.

This report assesses the FY 2012 reorganization of the Air Force Material Command (AFMC), which was undertaken as one of the initiatives to achieve mandated budget reductions by eliminating civilian manpower positions, thus achieving cost savings. One AFMC challenge was to absorb these cuts with minimal, if any, impact on its assigned missions in part by targeting staff positions.

Why have the costs of acquiring space systems been so high? What are the sources of the problem? To answer these questions, RAND undertook an extensive study of two space systems - the Space Based Infrared SystemHigh (SBIRS) and the Global Positioning System (GPS).This title analyzes the reason for the comparatively high growth in the cost of space systems by means of an in-depth study of two systems: SBIRS-High and GPS.

Late in 1996, the Air Force enlisted RAND's help to respond to inquiries from Congress about the effects of a specific Air Force proposal to consolidate and divest a portion of Eglin Air Force Base's test and evaluation capabilities. The analysis found areas of financial merit in the proposal but also elements that may not be cost effective. The authors highlight areas of risk for Air Force consideration prior to implementation.

This handbook, designed to help analysts assess cost estimates of space systems, covers planning an estimate and identifying the key data needed. It also provides typical cost ranges for components of relevant historical space programs. It supplements the Air Force Cost Analysis Agency's spacecraft training course by focusing on the cost analysis implications of the systems and processes covered in the course.

Cost analysts must predict-sometimes very far-into the future how much money the military will spend on weapon systems. But these analysts do not have perfect knowledge about tomorrow's technology, economic conditions, or any other future event. This book looks at how estimates for future weapon systems can be more realistic than in the past and how cost uncertainty analyses can be more comprehensive and informative.

The authors examine the effects on cost of various trends in test and evaluation for certain military systems.