David E. Thaler

The accelerated proliferation of legislative authorities for the Department of Defense (DoD) after September 11, 2001, has created an increasingly unwieldy catalog of security cooperation statutes, which have generated challenges in DoD planning and execution for engagement with foreign partners. This report develops a framework and options to streamline this patchwork of authorities that the DoD employs in security cooperation.

In this report, the authors use 11 case studies to create a typology of the barriers that impede U.S. security cooperation with highly capable allies and partners; identify some of the more specific barriers in the air, space, and cyber domains; suggest mitigation strategies for each of these barriers; and propose a preliminary approach for implementing some of these mitigation strategies.

In this study, RAND researchers examined the current role of security cooperation efforts as a tool in the emerging strategic competition among the United States, Russia, and China. In particular, they sought to identify how, where, and to what degree the three major competitors?plus Australia, Japan, India, and several countries in Europe?are using security cooperation.

In this report, researchers present recommendations for enabling the U.S. Army to better prioritize and coordinate its security cooperation activities with its allies for coalition operations and engagements in third countries, allowing it to meet its assigned objectives and strengthen combined capabilities to compete strategically and counter common threats around the world.

This report describes how the Israel Defense Force evolved to meet an adaptive and determined hybrid adversary during its wars in Gaza. It then draws a series of lessons from the Israeli experience for the U.S. Army and the joint force: from the importance of armored vehicles and active protection systems to the limitations of airpower in urban terrain and of conventional militaries to deter nonstate actors.

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.

Security cooperation is an important mission of the U.S. Air Force. This report reviews two core Air Force decisionmaking processes--the strategy, planning, and programming process and the concept development and acquisition process--to determine the extent to which decisionmakers consider security cooperation impact and to recommend ways to make such considerations systematic and explicit.

The Department of Defense s Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (CFE-DMHA) was established in 1994 to provide and facilitate education, training, and research in civil-military operations. This report examines CFE-DMHA s history, activities, and roles to determine how its missions can best be performed to achieve the objectives of the Department of Defense in this domain."

For over a decade, operations associated with irregular warfare have placed large demands on U.S. ground forces and have led to development of new Army and Joint doctrine. This report helps analysts identify and assess twelve key factors that create and perpetuate environments susceptible to insurgency, terrorism, and other extremist violence and instability to inform military decisions on allocation of analytic and security assistance resources.

Security cooperation is an important instrument of the U.S. government for advancing national security objectives vis-a-vis allies and partner countries. This report characterizes security cooperation mechanisms for capacity-building, produces a detailed database of the mechanism elements, develops and applies a preliminary means of evaluating select mechanisms, and recommends ways to improve mechanism effectiveness and efficiency.

As the commander in chief and highest political authority in Iran, the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has played a critical role in the direction of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This monograph identifies three key factors that will shape succession of the next Supreme Leader and outlines five alternative scenarios for the post-Khamenei era. It situates all of this within the context of the June 2009 election.

The U.S. ability to "read" the Iranian regime and formulate appropriate policies has been weakened by lack of access to the country and by the opacity of decisionmaking in Tehran. To improve understanding of Iran's political system, the authors describe Iranian strategic culture; investigate Iran's informal networks, formal government institutions, and personalities; assess the impact of elite behavior on Iranian policy; and summarize key trends.

In an analysis grounded in the observation that although Iranian power projection is marked by strengths, it also has serious liabilities and limitations, this report surveys the nature of both in four critical areas and offers a new U.S. policy paradigm that seeks to manage the challenges Iran presents through the exploitation of regional barriers to its power and sources of caution in the regime's strategic calculus.

The authors describe possible regional security structures and bilateral U.S. relationships with Iraq and Afghanistan. They recommend that the United States offer a wide range of security cooperation activities to compatible future governments in Kabul and Baghdad and should also plan to hedge against less-favorable contingencies. They emphasize that the U.S. Air Force should expect to remain heavily tasked for the foreseeable future.This book frames potential long-term U.S. security relationships with Iraq and Afghanistan in a regional context and posits roles of U.S. forces, especially the Air Force, in supporting these relationships under a variety of contingencies.