James G. Kallimani

This report summarizes the findings of research on U.S. and other armed forces' capabilities in the Arctic, the extent to which non-U.S. entities are operating where U.S. forces cannot, and how those operations might affect U.S. national interests. The authors found that the United States is lacking in capacity and, to a lesser extent, capability and that this creates risk for U.S. security.

To prepare for its next Defence White Paper, Australia is examining an enterprise-level naval shipbuilding plan. To support this effort, RAND researchers explore the feasibility of Australia sustaining a domestic naval shipbuilding industry compared with buying ships from foreign shipbuilders. The authors outline the complex consequences and trade-offs of both options.

The U.S. Navy's ship inventory and the shipbuilding and repair industrial base that supports these ships have experienced significant changes. In the next 30 years, additional significant changes to the fleet composition and the maintenance requirements of the fleet are likely. This report assesses possible supply and demand capabilities in the ship maintenance workload for the Navy and notes long-term challenges facing mitigation efforts.

To better understand why the rising number of civilians employed at the U.S. Navy's public shipyards has outpaced increases in workload, RAND researchers explore how shipyard work is changing, whether more personnel are now required to perform it, and what risks shipyards may wish to address through additional hiring.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confronts a variety of organizational-level risks within its programs that could influence the success of its missions or programs. This report provides NASA s Office of Strategy and Plans with a risk assessment methodology that integrates risk factors tailored to NASA s management, operations, and acquisition structures, allowing decisionmakers to compare risks within a common framework."

NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is working to expand flight research in order to advance the maturation and demonstrate the application of new aeronautics concepts and technologies over the next ten years. It therefore asked RAND to assess flight research capabilities and needs, identify any gaps, and develop management options that would facilitate increased and improved flight research.

Through analysis of alternative courses of action and their effects on probability distributions estimated for performance, schedule, and cost, acquisition decisionmakers can understand the implications of certain risk-mitigating actions. They can examine technology, schedule, and cost trades between or within individual systems.

What aeronautics research should be supported by the U.S. government? What compelling and desirable benefits drive that research? How should the government make these decisions? The authors develop a unified decisionmaking approach for addressing these questions. This framework quantifies the social and economic reasons for the research, balances competing perspectives, and enables transparent explanation of the resulting decisions.

In this book, RAND provides an evaluation of the Navy's ongoing and proposed unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) programs and describes the most promising applications of those UASs to the Navy1s operational tasks. The book identifies robust communications as a key enabler for UASs in many operational tasks and recommends steps the Navy can take to ensure these communications are available.

Much of the training for the engineering watchstanders of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that is currently done underway could be done in port. Training could also be done on simulators at considerable savings in time, money, fuel, and ship wear and tear. This monograph discusses how training simulator use could improve engineering watchstanders' proficiency before ships go to sea, reserving time at sea for fine-tuning the training.

RAND investigated cost-effective workforce-management strategies, alternative workload allocations, and the relevant best practices of comparable organizations to assist the Navy in managing the public shipyards. The Navy uses many practices common in other organizations, but reducing planned levels of overtime and increasing the permanent journeyman staff at the public shipyards could cost-effectively hedge against future workload growth.

Building on prior RAND research, this monograph explores the need for and retention of technical skills in the UK's maritime industry, particularly among designers and engineers involved with surface ship and submarine acquisition and support. The results reveal that the UK's future naval programme likely will have to be modified or augmented to sustain these technical skills in the long term.

The U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier fleet must meet the forward presence requirements of theater commanders. With a decreasing fleet size, planners must balance the timing of maintenance, training, and deployment with presence and surge demands. Evaluating multiple one- and two-deployment scenarios per cycle, RAND examines the feasibility of different cycle lengths, their effect on carrier forward presence, and their impact on shipyard workloads.

The Fleet Response Plan is a U.S. Navy program to enhance the operational availability of the aircraft carrier fleet. This report describes program modeling that varies the time between depot availabilities and the size of the depot work packages, to estimate its effect on the maintenance industrial base and the operational availability of the aircraft carrier fleet.