Paul Dreyer

The U. S. military has mostly operated at a high operational tempo since the end of the Cold War, and there appears to be no significant reduction in demand on the horizon. This report draws on historical data to quantify gaps in the U. S. Air Force's capacity to meet potential future demands.

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.

Space is now a congested, contested, and competitive environment. Space systems must become more resilient to potential adversary actions and system failures, but changes to space systems are costly. To reduce costs, the Air Force asked RAND to identify non-materiel means doctrine, organization, training, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy to enhance space resilience over the near and far terms."

Documents a phase-one effort to develop new methods to help ensure that warfighter needs are adequately represented as the Air Force manages its programs and budget. Drawing on previous RAND work on capabilities-based planning and portfolio management, the authors outline a method that considers measures of combat effectiveness, as well as cost-effectiveness from multiple perspectives, in comparing options for accomplishing a given mission.

This report is a reference manual and user's guide for RAND's Portfolio Analysis Tool (PAT), a spreadsheet-based software application for facilitating decisions dealing with uncertainty and different perspectives. PAT generates summary depictions to address issues of balance, using a spreadsheet-based format. PAT assists high-level decisionmakers in framing their thinking about balance, constructing good multifaceted options, and making choices.

Examines the capabilities and costs of onboard technologies to divert missiles attacking commercial airliners. Given the significant uncertainties in the cost and effectiveness of countermeasures, a decision to install them should be postponed, and concurrent development efforts to reduce these uncertainties should proceed as rapidly as possible.