Heather Krull

The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act required a federally funded research and development center to evaluate the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety, which administers the Civilian Marksmanship Program, in order to assess potential future transfers of excess firearms to the Corporation. This report summarizes the RAND Arroyo Center evaluation, with analyses of the discrete tasks in the legislative language.

The joint U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)-Department of Veterans Affairs Integrated Disability Evaluation System is the process by which DoD determines fitness for duty and separation or retirement because of disability. In this report, the authors evaluate four hypothetical alternative DoD disability compensation approaches that would support a simpler disability evaluation process by reducing reliance on disability ratings.

This monograph provides strategies to reemploy civil-service workers in the private sector and to increase private-sector employment in the Kurdistan Region Iraq. The research is based on a variety of methods, including analyses of survey data, analysis of Kurdistan regional and Iraqi national documents and laws, and a qualitative assessment of numerous conversations with government officials and private-sector employers."

Behavioral health (BH) conditions comprise the second most common medical reason for nondeployability in the U.S. Army. To inform the Army's efforts to monitor and improve outcomes, the authors aimed to identify promising metrics to assess readiness among soldiers and adult family members who receive BH care. Such metrics would expand the Army's outcome monitoring efforts beyond symptom improvement metrics for patients who received BH care.

The authors describe policy requirements for transfers from the active component (AC) to the reserve component (RC). They analyze the characteristics and duty limitations observed among AC to RC transfers and examine the service member's time in the AC for information related to the RC medical condition. Finally, they make recommendations to reduce the number of personnel who transfer with medical conditions that limit deployability.

The U.S. Army Medical Department's missions are to care for the war wounded during conflict and to operate medical treatment facilities (MTFs) that care for service members, their beneficiaries, and military retirees. Because the injuries that require treatment during wartime can be very different from the case mix seen in MTFs, the Army sought to identify ways to help providers prepare for wartime missions while they are stationed at home.

With the numbers of service members requiring rehabilitation following combat-related amputation decreasing since 2011, provider skills to treat and rehabilitate amputee patients will atrophy if active steps are not taken to mitigate against skill erosion. The authors identify core competencies in which skills should be maintained and improved so that the military medical community is prepared for future conflict and increased patient volume.

Understanding the current quality of care for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression delivered to service members is an important step toward improving care across the Military Health System (MHS). This report describes the characteristics of active-component service members who received care for PTSD or depression through the MHS and assesses the quality of care received using quality measures derived from administrative data.

Sending officers to graduate schools is costly to the services. While officers incur specific service requirements in return, does that recoup the investment? The authors found that, in the U.S. Navy, breaking even financially is not always realistic. But the skills and general knowledge that officers gain in the process extend the value of their degrees beyond their majors, particularly in careers leading to flag rank.