Dan Madden

The Army is currently reorienting from a focus on counterinsurgency operations to a focus on conventional combat operations, and this shift has highlighted the need to take a detailed look at the state of the field artillery. The authors of this report identify capability gaps in the field artillery and actions that the Army should consider taking from today to roughly 2030.

This report--Phase Two of a three-phase project--describes the current defense planning process used by the U.S. Department of Defense, with a focus on how scenarios are developed and employed to support defense planning. It examines and critiques how scenarios are used in current planning processes, based on an assessment of unclassified documents and dialogues with current and former participants in the process.

This report describes how to best measure and assess the progress and outcomes of locally focused stability operations (LFSO) the missions, tasks, and activities that create stability by building security, governance, and development. It identifies assessment and foundational challenges and outlines solutions, along with recommendations and implementation guidance. The report concludes with an assessment plan for a notional LFSO scenario."

The Global Response Force (GRF) is built for rapid response to unforeseen operations. This study determined access strategies for each geographic combatant command given constraints in aircraft, intermediate staging bases, operational capabilities, and other factors. Global access requires both well-established and austere staging bases; complex joint deployment concepts are necessary to ensure access.

Since 9/11, Russia, China, and Iran have successfully exploited or stretched U.S. thresholds for high-order war in order to further their strategic ends and, in the process, undermine U.S. interests. Each of these countries has made expert use of some combination of measures short of war to enact its strategies. This report describes those measures and how these nation-states use them and explains why U.S. notions of thresholds might be outdated.

Hybrid irregular and conventional military operations are playing an increasingly prominent role in international conflict, exploited by countries such as Russia and Iran. To counter this trend, the United States should adopt a new form of operational art for special warfare. This report proposes a framework for the design and execution of special warfare campaigns.

RAND researchers conducted a lessons learned examination of operations analysis, modeling, and simulation in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Researchers identified ways in which analysts have attempted to support commanders decision-making and describe a selection of the models and tools they employed."

This study examines the readiness reporting system in light of changes experienced by Army units in the past decade, a period in which the Army learned to adapt to emerging requirements by adding new capabilities quickly and flexibly. The current readiness reporting system captures only a portion of those changes in capabilities and has some important limitations. The study recommends ways to improve the reporting system for an adaptive Army.