Katharina Ley Best

The authors explore the concept of strategic readiness, outline a framework for how the U.S. Department of Defense might conduct a strategic readiness assessment (SRA), highlight several analytic tools that could be used within this framework, and apply them to two defense policy issues: munitions procurement and planning modernization schedules across services. The report concludes with recommendations for how an SRA might be implemented.

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.

The Army is currently reorienting from a focus on counterinsurgency operations to a focus on conventional combat operations, and this shift has highlighted the need to take a detailed look at the state of the field artillery. The authors of this report identify capability gaps in the field artillery and actions that the Army should consider taking from today to roughly 2030.

This report--Phase Two of a three-phase project--describes the current defense planning process used by the U.S. Department of Defense, with a focus on how scenarios are developed and employed to support defense planning. It examines and critiques how scenarios are used in current planning processes, based on an assessment of unclassified documents and dialogues with current and former participants in the process.

Security cooperation's importance, scale, and complexity have grown substantially in recent years, but efforts to develop and manage the Department of Defense security cooperation workforce have lagged. This study informs the development of career models for the security cooperation workforce, assesses potential requirements for competencies and experience, and identifies potential job families within the workforce to facilitate management.

The U.S. Army has been working toward achieving a clean financial audit for decades but has yet to show significant progress in doing so. RAND conducted a study of Army financial management organizations to identify opportunities for change.

Climate hazards adversely affect the physical environment in which the U.S. Department of Defense must operate, thereby adversely affecting the performance of the joint force. Acknowledging that climate effects will likely become more severe as global temperatures rise, the authors of this report discuss findings from a study they conducted to develop links between climate and force readiness.

Personnel and career management are critical to a well-trained U.S. Army Reserve (USAR), and end strength forecasts are an important input to recruiting and retention policy decisions. Currently, no single model is capable of providing such forecasts. The authors examined existing modeling tools and developed an Integrated Modeling Concept--a detailed plan for combining outputs from those tools to enable USAR to forecast 24-month end strength.

The U.S. Army has introduced the global landpower network (GLN) concept as a means to integrate, sustain, and advance the Army's considerable ongoing efforts to meet U.S. national security guidance emphasizing the importance of working closely with partner nations to achieve U.S. strategic objectives. This report develops the GLN concept further.

The Global Response Force (GRF) is built for rapid response to unforeseen operations. This study determined access strategies for each geographic combatant command given constraints in aircraft, intermediate staging bases, operational capabilities, and other factors. Global access requires both well-established and austere staging bases; complex joint deployment concepts are necessary to ensure access.