Ryan Haberman

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.

Air Force Special Warfare operators conduct physically and mentally challenging missions. For this career field, specialized assessment and selection of future operators is required. The authors examine the programs for assessing and selecting personnel for AFSPECWAR, identify job-relevant attributes, consider how these attributes should be weighted for candidate selection, and improve the accuracy of raters' evaluations of candidates.

The authors analyze the prospect that Iran will further invest in Yemen's Houthis and develop them into an enduring proxy group. The authors examine the Houthi movement's history, the Houthis' current relations with Iran, Iran's history of proxy development, and the trajectory of the Houthi-Iran relationship, and then pose scenarios for the future. The report should be of interest to a wide audience in the foreign policy and defense community.

The authors compare the Department of Defense's health readiness assessments against their stated objectives and identify potential opportunities for improvement and increased efficiencies.

This report presents some of the challenges that the U. S. Department of Defense (DoD) may face in fielding an artificial intelligence technology called reinforcement learning (RL) in DoD applications. RL has been credited with expanding the decisionmaking ability of machines beyond that of humans in playing complex games of strategy. RL-enabled systems can beat world experts in these games; can such systems outperform humans in DoD applications?

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.

Stressors from climate change will become more intense and more frequent in the U. S. Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility. This development will likely contribute to CENTCOM's shift from a warfighting-focused command to a command that responds to and conducts traditional and nontraditional security missions. The aim of this report is to help CENTCOM planners prepare for a future security environment that is affected by climate change.

Airpower played a pivotal role in the U. S.-led fight against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2019. This report sheds light on debates about the impact of air operations and how airpower was applied. The authors find that airpower was essential, but it alone would not have been likely to defeat the militant group. Instead, the combination of airpower and partner-led ground forces was needed to destroy the Islamic State as a territorial entity.