Sherrill Lingel

This report summarizes the findings of research on U. S. and other armed forces' capabilities in the Arctic, the extent to which non-U. S. entities are operating where U. S. forces cannot, and how those operations might affect U. S. national interests. The authors found that the United States is lacking in capacity and, to a lesser extent, capability and that this creates risk for U. S. security.

To address concerns that warfare could extend to space, the national security space community has taken steps to enhance space mission assurance (SMA), leading to an increasing demand for assessments of SMA. The authors describe decisionmaker needs for assessments of SMA, challenges for conducting assessments, the shortfalls that may result from the challenges, and options for addressing the shortfalls.

This report, the second of a two-volume series, provides technical details in support of the first volume, Leveraging Complexity in Great-Power Competition and Warfare: Volume I, An Initial Exploration of How Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking Can Frame Opportunities and Challenges. It contains a literature review of complex adaptive system (CAS) research, a CAS lens user manual, and a Markov chain formulation of the adversary decision process.

The authors seek to provide an initial examination of how complex adaptive systems thinking can frame opportunities and challenges of complexity in warfare. They examine how complex adaptive systems thinking can be applied to great-power competition and warfare to aid in understanding how complexity might be exploited to U. S. advantage.

The geography of the Pacific can present challenges for command and control (C2) of air operations, especially in the face of attempts to disrupt C2. This report recommends methods for comparing and contrasting alternative organizational concepts for C2 of joint air operations in the Pacific and applies them to a selection of concepts for two different scenarios, humanitarian and disaster relief and a major war with a near-peer competitor.

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.

How does the Army plan to ensure its continued access to potential trouble spots around the world? The authors developed scenarios and conducted political-military games to determine what strategies, tactics, and capabilities potential adversaries might use to complicate U. S. access to key areas and how effective the U. S. counters to these tactics are. They were sanguine about the ability of the U. S. to prevail in the short-term but also identified several conc erns and suggested areas of improvement, including expanding the number of in-theater bases that might be available; enhancing the flexibility and deployability of U. S. forces to more austere bases; and upgrading detection, warning, and force protection measures.