Don Snyder

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.

RAND conducted two cybersecurity-focused discovery games in Washington, D.C., and California s Silicon Valley that aimed to capture the widest possible range of perspectives. The goals were to explore opportunities for improving cybersecurity, assess the implications of possible solutions, and develop an initial framework to support debate and inform decisions regarding cybersecurity policies and practices."

Systems and operations have become more dependent on interconnected electronics and data. As that dependence grows, so does the need for mission assurance in the face of adversarial cyber operations. The authors offer ways to help wings assure their missions despite cyber attacks, focusing on how wings can maintain situational awareness, defend their systems, and respond to and recover from attacks to survive and operate when under cyber attack.

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.

A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB RECOMMENDED READINSPIRED BY ONE OF THE LAST GREAT UNTOLD STORIES OF WW11916. Young artist Sam Burke is spared death by firing squad on the battlefields of France and brought to a remote castle by the Irish Sea. At the ‘Tin Nose Shop’ he is tasked with creating intricate masks to hide the mutilated faces of his fellow soldiers from the Front. While he tries to come to terms with the death of his best friend and the promise he failed to keep, Sam and the disfigured soldiers struggle to return to their former lives and their loved ones.A stirring and emotional tale based on the real-life story of the Tin Nose Shop.'Beautifully written and sensitively observed' Hazel Gaynor'Beautifully written and thought-provoking' Ruth Hogan'Will both break your heart and give it wings as it explores the healing powers of friendship, love, hope and purpose' Robin Wells'One of the best historical novels I have read in a long time... I have never read anything quite like it' Mark Sullivan'Here is a beautifully written novel, sensitive, exploring not so much the brutality of war but the humanity which stems from it' The Yorkshire Times'There are many novels based on the events of World War I; this one has to be among the most compassionate and moving' Historical Novel Society

Researchers present a Future Logistics Concept Assessment Framework, which is a disciplined, systematic way to assess proposed future logistics concepts to meet the requirements of the National Defense Strategy. The idea is to reveal the most-promising concepts and prune the least promising before significant resources are invested. The goal is not to predict the future, but to show how a concept would fare across various potential futures.

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.

As programs grow larger and the interdependencies of the program activities get complex, tools are needed to introduce more rigor into program management to reduce schedule risk. The authors of this report describe novel methods delivered to the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program office to reduce the likelihood of rework in program execution and provide insights into schedule risk and how to restructure task dependencies to manage risk.

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.

The U.S. Air Force asked RAND Project AIR FORCE to determine where it is most fruitful to focus effort in making changes to tactics, techniques, and procedures to improve an airman's ability to detect, evaluate, and mitigate significant corruption of logistics data. The goal is to respond to errors in data before they have a significant negative effect on combat operations.

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.

The findings presented here reexamine capabilities-based programming by introducing a new definition of capability metrics and a new set of algorithms for building and evaluating programs. The tools provide the programmer with a means to quantitatively and reproducibly develop programming options in light of an uncertain future, serving as a means to express capabilities and risks of resource allocations in terms of national planning objectives.

A new metric for measuring expeditionary medical support (EMEDS) and a construct for applying it across three Air Force medical missions: deployed military support, humanitarian relief, and defense support to civil authorities. The new metric focuses on the rate at which each component of the deployment system can evaluate, stabilize, triage, treat, and evacuate patients, or the medical STEP rate, to replace the current inadequate measure, beds.

This book describes a potential common operating system (COP) for the Air Force material sustainment system (MSS). The authors first develop a COP based on the principles of effects-based measures, schwerpunkt (organizational focus), decision rights, and a nonmarket economic framework, then they apply the COP to depot-level reparable component sustainment to illustrate how the COP would improve overall MSS efficiency and responsiveness.This book describes a common operating picture for the Air Force materiel sustainment system that, if implemented, would make the system more efficient and more responsive to changing operational needs.