Michelle D Ziegler

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.

The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act required a federally funded research and development center to evaluate the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice and Firearms Safety, which administers the Civilian Marksmanship Program, in order to assess potential future transfers of excess firearms to the Corporation. This report summarizes the RAND Arroyo Center evaluation, with analyses of the discrete tasks in the legislative language.

To prepare for challenges it could face in future decades, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) operates a strategic foresight initiative, Project Evergreen. Researchers designed an analytic game, Paratus Futurum, for the initiative in which players assess demand for USCG missions and the service's capacity to execute them in 2040 and beyond. This report documents the researchers' findings and recommendations for coming iterations of Paratus Futurum.

This report summarizes the findings of Evergreen V, the most recent iteration of an ongoing scenario-based strategic foresight initiative that aims to help the U.S. Coast Guard identify issues, areas of opportunity, and potential challenges that it will likely face in the coming decades, so that senior leadership can better bridge the gap between near- and long-term planning and prepare the service to meet future demands.

Hurricane Maria magnified Puerto Rico's fragile system for delivering social, behavioral, and environmental health services, which were evidenced by chronic disease burdens, demographic transitions, and unmet health needs. The recovery plan outlines action strategies for building a robust health infrastructure, strengthening the health care workforce, expanding social service capacity, and investing in healthy communities.

Because U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) rotary-wing aircraft are nearing their ends of life, the USCG is reassessing its airpower needs for its current missions and future operational requirements. Researchers assessed what airpower mixes could help the USCG execute its missions across the entire geographic domain for operations in the next 30 years. In this report, they document their findings and make recommendations.

To support U.S. Department of Homeland Security efforts to prioritize capability investments, this report examines trends in small unmanned aerial system development, the features that are likely to aid nefarious users, and how such actors could use an sUAS (or multiple systems) to conduct various types of operations-from surveilling U.S. government facilities to dispersing a chemical agent at a large public event.