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This report, which provides a narrative account of four battles within Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) and a review of U.S. ground force contributions to those battles, is intended to serve as an operational history and review of warfighting functions as applied to OIR. Although OIR was both a Coalition fight and joint one, the report's focus on U.S. ground forces is meant to address gaps both in analysis and in the common understanding of OIR. This research was structured according to the operational concept of by, with, and through. This concept refers to the U.S. military's reliance on local partners-either a host nation government or a local surrogate force-to prosecute ground fighting with U.S. support. That support typically encompasses U.S. advising and enablers and could involve U.S. forces accompanying the partner. Although the terminology is familiar to those working in national security, it has yet to be formalized in joint doctrine and there are inconsistencies in its usage. The authors trace the development of the concept and its application in OIR, then analyze how it might be better incorporated into military doctrine. The authors detail four battles: the counterattacks on Ramadi and on Fallujah, setting the conditions for Mosul, and the urban fight in Mosul. The choice of these operations was made to ensure treatment of the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was defeated in Iraq and to cover battles at different points in the overall campaign.

The authors evaluate claims about the potential economic benefits of U.S. military engagement and find evidence that U.S. alliances increase bilateral trade in manufactured goods, which has a modest but positive effect on overall U.S. economic welfare.

In this report, researchers describe fifth-generation (5G) security and identify where the United States has security advantages or disadvantages relative to China in the 5G competition and how to preserve those advantages.

Information and information technologies infuse all parts of modern society-in peacetime, during periods of strategic competition, and during wartime. Since the early 2000s, advanced information technologies for rapidly sharing, processing, and analyzing data have had a significant effect on the character of Russian military operations. An examination of the Russian military-scientific literature reveals the centrality of the concept of information confrontation in Russian military strategy. Information confrontation, or informatsionnoe protivoborstvo (IPb), is a distinct element of Russian strategic thinking in the post-Cold War era. Russia sees itself as being in a constant state of information confrontation with the West as it tries to expand its own dominance and prevent its adversaries from gaining influence. In this report, the authors examine prevailing definitions and types of information confrontation, and they discuss the historical evolution of Russian (and Soviet) influence operations and psychological warfare, from 18th-century Imperial Russia up to the Vladimir Putin era. As a fundamental element of Russian strategy, information confrontation is evolving from something primarily carried out to supplement traditional means of waging war into something that is carried out continuously and in peacetime to shape the operational environment so that it will be malleable in future conflicts. The authors also analyze the experience of Ukraine, which has been the subject of one of Russia's most comprehensive IPb and hybrid warfare campaigns in recent years. Ukraine offers a window into the present-day role of IPb and Russian activities and intentions in the information domain.

In 2019, researchers from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) fielded a survey to estimate the annual prevalence of workplace harassment and discrimination at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and assess employee perceptions of leadership and workplace climate. The survey results revealed areas in need of improvement and helped guide FEMA leadership decisions about programming and policy responses. With the results in hand, FEMA published its "Culture Improvement Action Plan," laying out objectives, programs, and actions intended to create a safe workplace for all employees. To understand whether this objective had been achieved, FEMA asked HSOAC researchers to repeat the workforce survey two years after the first survey had been administered. The survey was repeated in the spring of 2021, with results indicating a substantial reduction from 2019 of harassment and discrimination in the workplace, albeit still a high prevalence. This report presents the survey results and a discussion about how changes in the workplace during the response period might have influenced the findings. An annex to this report contains detailed tabular data of survey results and the complete survey instrument. The survey was designed to provide an independent and objective assessment of the prevalence and characteristics of harassment and discrimination at FEMA, whether or not victims chose to elevate incidents to FEMA leadership, and employee perspectives on workplace climate.

Researchers from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center have developed a methodology for understanding and prioritizing cybersecurity risk in election infrastructure to assist state and local election officials.

The authors of this report explore the use of agent-based modeling as a method for studying the effects of information and communications technologies on the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social movements over time.

This report is a compendium of expert insights regarding opportunities for investing in science and technology to increase U.S. ability to engage in long-term competition in undergoverned spaces.

Researchers developed cost-estimating tools and estimated future construction costs for Puerto Rico's recovery from Hurricane María. This report documents their approach, data, findings, and recommendations.

A future price forecast can help the Federal Emergency Management Agency and communities seeking its Public Assistance estimate construction costs. Researchers created a framework for determining when such a forecast could be useful.

Improving the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition system-the management and development processes by which the department acquires, develops, and sustains weapon systems, automated information systems, and services-has been an issue of sustained interest to policymakers since the beginning of the military establishment. Numerous actions have been initiated and implemented over decades to rein in the increasing life-cycle costs and to ensure a timely delivery of these systems to meet U.S. security needs. In this report, researchers describe overarching trends that affect the defense acquisition system, outline challenges in DoD's defense acquisition process, and suggest improvements that might help address those challenges. The study is informed by open-source documents and insights from publicly available RAND Corporation research on defense acquisition, especially reports published since 1986, when a similar review of RAND research was published.

Researchers extended previous analyses that produced estimates of sexual assault and harassment risk across installations and commands. The extended analyses showed variation in risk of sexual assault and sexual harassment across groups of soldiers.

Appointment scrolls are required for officers to enter the services and to take on service in a different grade, military service, or component. This report contains recommendations for increasing the efficiency of the scroll creation process.

The U.S. Army has several levers at its disposal to try to meet its recruiting mission, with resources jointly used for both Regular Army (RA) and U.S. Army Reserve (USAR) accessions. These resources differ in their cost per additional recruit produced and the lead time necessary to change individual resourcing levels and affect enlistments. The Army can also modify recruit eligibility policies to help it achieve its accession requirement within available resources. Recruiting resources and enlistment eligibility policies work together as a system to produce RA and USAR recruits, and understanding their interactions under varying requirements and environments enables decisionmakers to use their limited resources more effectively and efficiently to achieve the Army's accession requirements. The authors present a model-the Reserve Recruiting Resource Model (RRRM)-designed to optimize the resource levels and mix needed to achieve future USAR recruiting goals under changing enlisted accession requirements and recruiting environments and alternative eligibility policies for potential recruits. The model also enables comparison of alternative courses of action. This research builds on prior work by the RAND Arroyo Center on the effectiveness and lead times of alternative recruiting resources. In their results, the authors discuss using the RRRM to predict annual accessions from a specified baseline resourcing plan and provide several examples of how the tool can be used to assess potential recruiting resource and policy trade-offs or to prepare for alternative recruiting requirements via optimization of recruiting resources used for USAR recruiting.

Over the past decade, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has evolved its programming organization multiple times, along with the process it uses for managing its resource investments. Each of these iterations was done to address challenges and inefficiencies. NGA is now considering additional steps to improve its process and is seeking to improve its practices through internal improvements, such as gaining an understanding of how previous changes affected the overall effectiveness of its resource management process, and what can be learned from other organizations. NGA is now entering a fourth period of acquisition restructuring that is intended to improve on how the planning and programming phases are managed. NGA asked the RAND Corporation to review the programming phase of the Intelligence Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Evaluation (IPPBE) process. The authors looked at three organizational eras (pre-2013, 2013-2018, and 2018 to the present) to determine the conditions, causes, and effects of performance and effectiveness generally and of previous changes to this phase of NGA IPPBE for each era. NGA is not alone in its ongoing effort to modernize its IPPBE structure to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Although NGA has conducted several previous internal studies to identify areas for IPPBE process improvement, this research is the first to synthesize findings between external literature and findings gleaned from structured subject-matter expert interviews to highlight crucial program-process issues for NGA leadership to absorb and address in any future IPPBE restructuring phase.

The authors examined how the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has programmed its resources, focusing on the reasons for changes over time and the results of the changes.

Getting early indication of potential contractor performance risks and contract execution issues is critical for proactive acquisition management. When contractors are in danger of not meeting contractual performance goals, Department of the Air Force (DAF) acquisition management may not be fully aware of the shortfall until, for example, a schedule deadline is missed, government testing indicates poor system's technical performance, or costs exceed expectations. Concerns continue to be raised about cost and schedule growth in acquisition and experts postulate about a lack of knowledge about the status of acquisition programs. In this report, the authors focus on metrics to identify emerging execution problems earlier than traditional acquisition oversight systems to enable more-proactive risk and performance management. They summarize their findings, which include a taxonomy of contractor relative risks, leading indicators of performance, relevant data sources, risk measures and equations, and a prototype that implements some of these findings using real data sources. This research should be of interest to acquisition professionals and leadership who are searching for ways to improve acquisition performance through early identification of potential relative contractor risks and execution problems to inform active program management and mitigation of risks. The prototype should be of interest to acquisition officials (from program managers to milestone decision authorities) to help them access more data in an easy-to-understand way so they can focus their limited time on areas that require increased management attention. This approach should be useful during any phase of the acquisition process.

This report examines U.S. structures and processes for non-cyber emergency management and whether U.S. officials can learn from these other incidents to help public and private sector stakeholders improve preparations for response to cyber incidents.

To ensure its service members have the requisite physical fitness to serve, the Department of the Air Force (DAF) has established a variety of medical and physical standards. The DAF also recognizes that building a more comprehensive understanding of how different factors influence exercise habits, test preparation, and the perceived importance of fitness is critical to promoting a ready and deployable force. The authors evaluate Air Force (AF) data relevant to the Tier 1 fitness assessment (FA) from all AF-FAs completed by active duty officers and enlisted personnel from fiscal year (FY) 2005 to FY 2018 to examine the fitness of the AF's active component. The Tier 1 FA consists of four components: a 1.5-mile run or 2.0-kilometer walk, designed to measure cardiorespiratory fitness; an abdominal circumference (AC) measurement for body composition; and push-ups and sit-ups, which assess muscular fitness. In this report, the authors explore the relationships between component fitness scores with career and health outcomes and examine airmen's perceptions of current fitness policies and the culture of fitness across the DAF. They conclude by recommending several strategies to improve the rationale for and the validity and acceptance of the AF-FA.

This report presents results from a systematic review and meta-analyses of research examining how mindfulness meditation affects 13 performance-related outcomes of interest to the U.S. Army and broader military.

Traumatic brain injuries and psychological health problems such as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance use, often referred to as invisible wounds, are common among U.S. military veterans who served in the era after September 11, 2001. Although there are effective treatments for these conditions, it has been challenging to identify places that provide such care, as there has not been a shared definition of what makes care high quality. In a previous study, high-quality care for invisible wounds was defined as care that is veteran-centered, accessible, and evidence-based and that includes outcome monitoring. Identifying standards to operationalize this definition is essential for improving access to high-quality, effective care. In this report, the authors recommend ten standards for the delivery of high-quality care for invisible wounds and provide considerations for implementing and disseminating these standards. Adoption of these standards of care would allow veterans, veteran-serving organizations, and payers to identify high-quality care providers and distinguish between good and poor care. The standards also provide a road map for providers that fall short of the benchmark and might need to invest in training and other resources to improve quality and demonstrate their ability to provide the best possible care for veterans living with invisible wounds.

Between 2000 and 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense diagnosed more than 444,300 service members as experiencing at least one traumatic brain injury (TBI) during their military service. The number of TBIs experienced, and their severity, can affect the trajectory of and prognosis for recovery. Much progress has been made in developing, implementing, and disseminating effective treatments for TBI, yet gaps remain in understanding the long-term care and support needs for veterans who have sustained one or more TBIs during their military service. This report presents the findings from a study commissioned by Wounded Warrior Project (WWP) and conducted by the RAND Corporation to identify the long-term outcomes of TBI for veterans serving since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the future needs of this population; effective treatments for TBI; and the availability of community-based resources. The information in this report can be used to better understand which approaches may offer the best care for veterans with TBI, as well as help inform the care and support offered to veterans and their caregivers.