Matthew W Lewis

Company leaders in the U.S. Army have long been recognized as overworked, partly because of the number of requirements imposed on them by higher headquarters. This report is intended to help the Army identify ways to reduce and manage the time burdens on Active Component company leaders in garrison by addressing the challenges of reducing time burdens at both organizational and individual worker levels.

To understand the relationship between participating in the U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (AJROTC) program and longer-term outcomes, the authors analyzed longitudinal student data and Army service member records. A logic model and interviews contextualize study findings of increased attendance and graduation rates but reduced college enrollment rates among those participating in AJROTC for all of high school.

Provisional unit equipping differs from the traditional way the Marine Corps equips forces, which places a burden on the logistics enterprise. The totality of the problem demands a multipronged approach as the best course of action.

The results of the 2015 National Principal Survey show the context in which Teach For America (TFA) corps members work, how principals perceive corps members, and how principals perceive their interactions with TFA. These findings can help TFA staff provide more-tailored supports to corps members, inform professional development, and continue to build relationships with the principals of schools in which corps members serve.

Competency-based education meets students where they are academically, provides students with opportunities for choice, and awards credit for evidence of learning, not for the time students spend studying a subject. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked RAND to evaluate three competency-based education grants in terms of implementation, students experiences, and student performance."

Combat Support Hospitals, when not deployed, keep a partial set of equipment at home station with the remainder in long-term storage, a strategy that has created maintenance and obsolescence challenges. This briefing describes a new strategy for configuring home station equipment sets and proposes that deploying CSHs eliminate much of the unit-owned equipment currently in long-term storage, actions that will sharply reduce total equipment costs.

This study examined how the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative might encourage the reuse of digital training content as a strategy to reduce the cost of its development. While findings highlighted a number of current challenges with the reuse option, one conclusion is that ADL can foster more reuse by taking a proactive approach in supporting training development organizations that are attempting to implement a reuse strategy.

To inform the U.S. Army's decisionmaking process surrounding commonality in military equipment, RAND was asked to assess the advantages and disadvantages of commonality and how to best manage their trade-offs. This report presents analyses of the effects of commonality on costs, capabilities, and training and offers a decisionmaking aid that designers, developers, and procurers could use to inform their decisions about commonality.

The Army wishes to improve its training strategy for Brigade Combat Teams equipped with Future Combat Systems (FCS) technologies. Key findings are that live training events will remain a cornerstone of FCS unit training, and that adaptation to changing operational requirements will be a challenge. Planned enhancements will provide important improvements for the system, but the overall training capability achieved will fall short of requirements.

As the U.S. Army becomes increasingly interested in "commonality"--the sharing of common parts across different entities--there is a need for a clearer definition of the concept. Motivated by the reported costs arising from a lack of clear definitions during recent Army acquisition processes and by cases in which unclear definitions have led to significant problems, this report offers a new, more rigorous lexicon and illustrative examples.

An examination of policies and alternatives for increasing the contribution of The Army School System (TASS) to Army readiness and improving the integration of the Active Component (AC) and Reserve Component (RC) training systems. The study recommends that the Army adopt private-sector models in developing interactive media instruction, develop a more effective local school system to better meet future unit training needs, and improve the integration of AC-RC training institutions to leverage existing resources and expand options.