Marek N Posard

This report defines and describes will to fight and provides a model of unit will to fight that can be applied to ground combat units of any scale. The model provides a research-grounded template for case-by-case adviser assessment of partner or allied military forces and the intelligence analysis of adversary forces. This report also provides a theoretical basis for adding will to fight to military war gaming and simulation.

U.S. Space Command was reestablished as a combatant command in 2019 and has a diverse workforce. To ensure this command's success, it is important to enhance the resilience of its personnel. In this report, the authors offer best practices to enhance workforce resilience, identify some challenges and barriers to resilience program implementation, and propose recommendations to address these challenges and barriers.

Policy and U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) professionals have suggested that the IC is held in increasingly lower regard by some decisionmakers and that predictions have had variable success in influencing decisionmakers. Researchers explored whether and to what degree trust in intelligence predictions and national estimates has degraded over time and what factors might have driven any changes in the relationship between policymakers and the IC.

The authors of this report draw on Russian-language sources to examine trends in Russian personnel policies and initiatives from the 1990s through December 2021, prior to Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. They review the pervasive challenges within the Russian military to modernizing its personnel policies and evaluate reform efforts of the late 2000s through 2021, when major military reforms were implemented.

There is growing interest among U.S. government, defense, and intelligence organizations about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) flying in U.S. airspace. Public reporting of UAPs may help government officials identify potential threats. In this report, RAND researchers examine where UAPs are being reported to increase awareness of the types of activities that might be mistaken for unexplained phenomena or that point to potential threats.

Social movement research is becoming increasingly important, as information and communications technologies (ICTs) have altered the ways movements form, organize, mobilize, and act, as well as the ways in which they are surveilled and disrupted. The authors of this report explore the use of agent-based modeling as a method for studying the effects of ICTs on the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social movements over time.

Airmen, their families, and Air Force civilian employees face a range of personal and work-related challenges. To assist Air Force leaders and service providers in identifying the needs of their communities and prioritizing efforts to address them, the Air Force sponsored the 2017 Air Force Community Feedback Tool--a self-reported needs assessment of Air Force community members. This report synthesizes results and draws lessons from the findings.

This report, the fourth in a series on election threats, describes research from focus groups and individual interviews on responses to memes sourced in Russia that were designed to breed dissension and to a public service announcement warning about such online manipulation. It then outlines a strategy to counter such interference that involves coordinating with social media companies and releasing simple PSAs for use during election cycles.

As targets of information aggression, the United States and its European allies must protect themselves against the effects of psychological manipulation and influence. The authors describe apparent efforts by Russia and its agents to use information to shape Russia's operating environment, and they identify possible defensive approaches for United States European Command and its partners.

Given the size and scope of the Russian propaganda campaign that targeted the U.S. electorate in 2016, it is critical to understand the impact of that campaign and mechanisms that can reduce the impact of future campaigns. This report, the third in a series, describes a study that assessed how people react to and engage with this propaganda, and found that media literacy advisories and labeling the source of the propaganda had a counter effect.

There is much more to Army service than the outlines with which most Americans are familiar. A separate RAND Arroyo Center report details the service experiences of 81 junior enlisted soldiers; the objective of this report is to provide deeper insight into the junior enlisted experience in a way that is accessible to policymakers, Army leaders, recruiters, and potential recruits. This volume tells the stories of six soldiers in their own words.

The U.S. Army Recruiting Command asked RAND Arroyo Center to undertake research to improve its understanding of soldiers' motivations to join the Army, and how the reality of Army life matches up with expectations. This study's portrayal of the U.S. Army private could serve as an educational tool for a variety of important audiences, such as Army senior leadership, junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and prospective new recruits.