Elizabeth Hastings Roer

The U.S. government has developed hundreds of approaches to promote and protect critical technologies and their associated industrial base, and the sheer number and diversity of these programs, policies, and initiatives present a logistical challenge for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The authors of this report describe a tool designed to help DoD decisionmakers--upon discovering a risk or vulnerability to a critical technology--quickly and effectively determine relevant approaches to mitigate the problem.

This report focuses on how competitive source selections can be used to better emphasize the government's goals related to reducing operating and support (O&S) costs. The U.S. Air Force has struggled with how to incorporate O&S costs into its source selection process because of attributes of O&S activities, regulatory requirements, and institutional factors that discourage their inclusion.

To help improve military-to-civilian transition outcomes for U.S. service members and veterans, the authors of this report seek to map the current landscape of employment-focused transition programs by summarizing their benefits, target populations, and goals; investigating their costs; identifying the most-expensive programs; and examining how program effectiveness is evaluated.

The purpose of this report is to assist Department of Defense decisionmakers called upon to respond to adverse economic shocks by identifying opportunities for improving analysis of shocks and their effects on U.S. defense postures. The authors examined historical and hypothetical instances in which shocks threatened or would threaten defense postures to identify the types of questions that an analytic capability might be able to answer.

Policymakers have increased emphasis on national security risks deriving from globalization of weapon system supply chains. This report addresses the challenges the U.S. Air Force faces in mitigating the effects of these risks and suggests ways to improve how it addresses such risks in source selection and other decisions.