Colby Peyton Steiner

A high-end fight places heavy demands on U.S. Air Force command and control of combat support. Policy has increasingly emphasized the need for new concepts, such as dynamic force employment, which stresses the need to maneuver and function in a communications degraded environment. The authors propose robust and resilient concepts for the command and control of logistics in such a situation.

The Air Force has long faced a challenge integrating force design and capability development planning with programming. RAND Project Air Force assisted the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC) in conceptualizing analytical and other products to support concept development, force design options, and capability development planning. The authors present findings and recommendations for AFWIC's analytical processes and products.

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.

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) today stands at a crossroads over its launch acquisition strategy. In this report, authors analyze the heavy lift launch market to help the USAF gain clearer insight into the number of U.S. launch service providers that the global heavy lift launch market can support and the impact of near-term decisions on the USAF's ability to (1) meet NSS launch demand using U.S. providers and (2) sustain two or more U.S. providers.

To support U.S. Department of Homeland Security efforts to prioritize capability investments, this report examines trends in small unmanned aerial system development, the features that are likely to aid nefarious users, and how such actors could use an sUAS (or multiple systems) to conduct various types of operations-from surveilling U.S. government facilities to dispersing a chemical agent at a large public event.