Karl P Mueller

Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition, and today's security environment demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats. This analysis of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on a range of historical examples from World War I through Somalia in the early 1990s to inform escalation-related decisionmaking.

The raison d'etre for any military is to deter an adversary from acting inimically to a nation's interests or, if deterrence fails, to coerce him into ceasing the actions. After defining terms and reviewing the literature on coercion, this report looks at the utility of the military as a coercive instrument. The authors analyze cases that provide insights into conventional coercion. They conclude by stressing the unchanged nature of coercion and that only a thorough understanding of our adversaries, and of our own will and capabilities, will yield a successful coercive strategy. (DS)

This report assesses how China may react to expanded or varied U.S. military activities in the Indo-Pacific. It provides a framework of key factors likely to determine Chinese responses and identifies the characteristics of U.S. military activities that may either enhance deterrence of Chinese aggression or increase the risks of an escalatory Chinese reaction.

The foreign policy and defense communities have intensively debated the efficacy of low-cost and small-footprint military options for crises such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. This report provides a statistical analysis of hundreds of cases, supplemented by case studies, to evaluate the strategic effects of each option across a range of irregular warfare operations and in a range of operational environments.

This report assesses historical cases of U.S. Air Force innovation or apparent failure to innovate: innovations in strategic reconnaissance, nuclear survivability, suppression of enemy air defenses, and precision strategic attack; and apparent failures to innovate in close air support after World War II, early efforts to defeat Soviet integrated air defenses, and airborne high-value targeting in the post Cold War era."

This book emphasises on creating a new partnership to integrate air operations with ground fire and maneuver more effectively on future battlefields.

The Department of Defense has become increasingly focused on competition with China and Russia and the possibility of great power war. RAND researchers generated four plausible near-term war scenarios and assessed how they could shape the postwar strategic environment. These scenarios show the complex relationship between wartime and postwar goals, highlighting the importance of considering postwar outcomes in prewar planning.

Airpower played a pivotal role in the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2019. This report sheds light on debates about the impact of air operations and how airpower was applied. The authors find that airpower was essential, but it alone would not have been likely to defeat the militant group. Instead, the combination of airpower and partner-led ground forces was needed to destroy the Islamic State as a territorial entity.

A team of U.S. and international experts assesses the impact of various nations airpower efforts during the 2011 conflict in Libya, including NATO allies and non-NATO partners, and how their experiences offer guidance for future conflicts. In addition to the roles played by the United States, Britain and France, it examines the efforts of Italy, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Qatar, the UAE, and the Libyan rebels."

Does likely continued U.S. involvement in counterinsurgencies call for adding specialized aircraft, training, or other resources to the general airlift fleet? In general, existing U.S. airlift forces can accomplish most such missions effectively. But continued operations likely will require reinforcement of the general airlift fleet and, perhaps, acquisition of a small fleet element optimized for certain counterinsurgency missions.

RAND Project AIR FORCE studied the post-9/11 shift in U.S. defense policy emphasis toward preemptive and preventive attack, asking under what conditions preemptive or preventive attack is worth considering as a response to perceived threats. It considered the role such first-strike strategies are likely to play in future U.S. national security policy. Finally, it identified implications these conclusions have for military planners and policymakers as they prepare to deal with national security threats in the next decade.