Lauren A Mayer

To achieve its core mission set and in the face of the rapid development of potential adversary capabilities in space, the U.S. Space Force (USSF) needs to fundamentally rethink how it defines requirements. To support this necessary transformation, the authors identify implementable changes to USSF capability requirements development that leverage best practices in requirements development and digital engineering.

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.

Systems and operations have become more dependent on interconnected electronics and data. As that dependence grows, so does the need for mission assurance in the face of adversarial cyber operations. The authors offer ways to help wings assure their missions despite cyber attacks, focusing on how wings can maintain situational awareness, defend their systems, and respond to and recover from attacks to survive and operate when under cyber attack.

This document explains how to apply standard Office of Management and Budget and Department of Defense (DoD) guidance on project evaluation to product support business case analyses (BCAs) in a way that allows senior DoD decisionmakers to use net present value as the dominant figure of merit for comparing courses of action. Findings are stated in BCA dollar value terms, which are figures of merit that decisionmakers understand intuitively.

RAND Arroyo Center explored how the U.S. Army might need to adapt its personnel management policies and practices to support the Regionally Aligned Forces concept. Authors estimated the scope and scale of the requirement for regional expertise; modeled the Army s current ability to produce soldiers with the required expertise; and identified changes to the personnel management system to develop and match such soldiers with appropriate positions."

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.

Using results from a literature review; expert discussions; operational, technical, and strategic modeling; and case studies, the authors evaluate the utility the U.S. Air Force (USAF) might get from electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, how much influence the USAF has on technical development and supply chains, and options to transition emerging commercial technology to the USAF to recommend an eVTOL strategy for the USAF.

The acquisition process for a new weapon system begins with development of technical requirements to ensure that the system produced provides the needed operational capability within budget and schedule constraints. Oversights during this process can result in cost or schedule overruns, unsuitable operational performance, or outright cancellation. This report describes a systems-based approach to help improve this process.

Cyber mission thread analysis (CMTA), which identifies mission-critical systems in a cyber threat environment, requires a disciplined, well-planned process for its execution. This report provides a proposed planning and implementation guide (1) to perform CMTA expeditiously while still giving results good enough to make decisions about mission criticality, and (2) to analyze multiple missions concurrently.

What do experts envision as the largest technology-based challenges the U.S. Joint Force could confront by 2040? The authors develop and implement a three-stage approach to elicit and evaluate ideas from experts on technology challenges that are ?radically altering.? Twenty challenges were identified and evaluated by experts. These evaluations allowed the authors to classify those challenges into three clusters to help inform how the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) could prioritize science and technology (S&T) investments.

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.

Air Force activities to ensure resiliency to adversarial cyber operations are somewhat fractionated, with blurred lines of authority and no overall coordinating mechanisms to ensure that all related activities are identified, tasked, and implemented and act in concert to achieve enterprise objectives. The authors recommend better ways to manage, at the enterprise level, efforts to ensure resiliency of missions to adversarial cyber operations.

This report presents a framework for the development of metrics--and a method for scoring them--that indicates how well a U.S. Air Force mission or system is expected to perform in a cyber-contested environment. There are two types of cyber metrics: working-level metrics to counter an adversary's cyber operations and institutional-level metrics to capture any cyber-related organizational deficiencies.

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."

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.

Because license plate reader (LPR) technology is relatively new in the United States, opportunities and obstacles in its use in law enforcement are still under exploration. To examine issues about this technology, RAND conducted interviews with law enforcement personnel, police officers, and others responsible for procuring, maintaining, and operating the systems.