William Welser

Integrating women into special operations forces poses potential challenges for unit cohesion. The integration of women raises issues of effectiveness, in terms of physical standards and ensuring the readiness, cohesion, and morale essential to high-performing teams. This report assesses those challenges and provides analytical support for validating occupational standards for positions controlled by U. S. Special Operations Command.

Satellite anomalies are mission-degrading events that negatively affect on-orbit operational spacecraft. Maintaining a widely accessible and comprehensive database is one way to build an understanding of what situations are likely to result in satellite anomalies, but no such database exists. This report describes the nature and causes of satellite anomalies, and the potential benefits of a shared and centralized satellite anomaly database.

This report examines mechanisms, sources, and inter-Service agreements for funding special operations forces (SOF) operations and provides recommendations to reduce the frequency and duration of disputes between the United States Special Operations Command, the Military Departments, and Geographic Combatant Commands over their respective funding responsibilities for SOF.

This report examines the feasibility of using modern cryptographic tools to improve space situational awareness. Specifically, the authors examine the applicability of secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols as a means to compute the collision probability of two satellites. MPC protocols would provide satellite operators with a way to compute such conjunction analyses while maintaining the privacy of each operator s orbital information."

Orbital space debris represents a growing threat to the operation of man-made systems in space. With the goal of guiding future mitigation or remediation efforts, this monograph examines nine comparable problems that share similarities with orbital debris: acid rain, U. S. commercial airline security, asbestos, chlorofluorocarbons, hazardous waste, oil spills, radon, email spam, and U. S. border control.