Duncan Long

This report presents the strengths and limitations of cost-effectiveness analysis and related metrics to inform the U.S. Army about whether, when, and how to usefully employ them for capability investment decisions. The authors discuss how complexity can increase as objectives become less clear cut, ancillary benefits and unintended consequences emerge, technologies become intertwined, boundaries change, and risk and uncertainty take hold.

In a fluid global security environment such as ours, assessing the costs, risks, and likely consequences of alternative national defense strategies is as hard as it is essential. The authors show how, even in the face of uncertainty, the costs and other implications of any strategy can be assessed by examining the capabilities needed by U.S. combatant command - the chief agents of strategy - to fulfill what the strategy expects of them.

A debate will likely occur in 2009 about U.S. global national-security strategy. The authors describe and illustrate a methodology to help frame and evaluate resource-informed strategies. The core is an integrated portfolio-analysis approach that compares options by their anticipated effectiveness, risks, and resource implications. Three illustrative grand strategies are compared, which deal in different ways with the problems of our time.The monograph describes a portfolio-analysis approach for integrated comparison of alternative strategies, in terms of effectiveness, risks, and resource implications.

Previous research has identified that logistics and sustainment shortfalls are a critical barrier to U.S. operational success in the Indo-Pacific. In this report, the authors identify five case countries (Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea) and assess their potential to support the logistics and sustainment activities that are critical to the success of military operations.

Previous research has identified that logistics and sustainment shortfalls are a critical barrier to U.S. operational success in the Indo-Pacific. In this report, the authors identify five case countries (Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea) and assess their potential to support the logistics and sustainment activities that are critical to the success of military operations.

This volume describes nine warfighting scenarios to test whether the anti-access and area-denial threat to U.S. force projection is growing more severe in critical regions. The potential adversaries in the scenarios are China, Russia, and Iran. The scenarios describe plausible U.S. and adversary military actions based on common understanding of current operational capabilities and approaches.

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.

Documents a phase-one effort to develop new methods to help ensure that warfighter needs are adequately represented as the Air Force manages its programs and budget. Drawing on previous RAND work on capabilities-based planning and portfolio management, the authors outline a method that considers measures of combat effectiveness, as well as cost-effectiveness from multiple perspectives, in comparing options for accomplishing a given mission.