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The authors develop a definition of and model for measuring civilian workforce readiness to inform Army policies and practices using qualitative methods, with which they identify potential data sources for readiness metrics.

This report characterizes legal, policy, practice, and cost implications of U.S. Department of Defense options to comply with a new congressional requirement allowing service academy cadets and midshipmen who become parents to retain parental rights.

"In Syria, Ukraine, several African countries, and other conflict hotspots around the globe, private contractors are operating on behalf of, yet are ostensibly separate from, the Russian state. Reliance on these actors allows Russia to expand its military footprint while maintaining plausible deniability of direct involvement in major combat operations and competition short of armed conflict. The United States and its allies may be able to counter these actors and diminish their will to fight through cognitive maneuver, a concept that emphasizes changing minds and behaviors as a path to victory. An adaptation of the RAND-developed military will-to-fight model highlights opportunities to counter Russia's use of private military actors using cognitive maneuver. Accompanying multimethod qualitative analyses found potential vulnerabilities at the individual, team, organizational, state, and societal levels that could be targeted to diminish the motivation to fight among individual contractor personnel, the relationships between Russian private military companies and the Russian government and armed forces, and public opinion on the use of contractors and their treatment"--

This report explores the potential for competition and conflict among the United States, China, and Russia in Africa; where and why competition might turn into conflict; what form that conflict might take; and the implications for the United States.

This report presents results of an effort to determine how the U.S. Army might modernize special and incentive pays to better reward Army aviators' career advancement while cost-effectively achieving retention objectives.

Acute and chronic pain are common among service members and impact individual health and force readiness. Interviews with Military Health System staff and service member patients provide perspectives on ways to improve pain care.

The U.S. government will need to proactively recruit, hire, screen, onboard, and provide continuous career-growth opportunities-while providing an exceptional candidate experience-to attract and retain new generations to the national security workforce. This report explores how existing security, suitability, and credentialing (SSC) mechanisms might benefit from a formalized candidate experience strategy and framework to create a more positive vetting experience. Organizations that provide investigative and adjudicative services (e.g., investigative service providers, authorized adjudicative agencies) and other SSC stakeholders will need to increase engagement to promote, gauge, and maintain candidate commitment throughout initial personnel vetting. SSC processes may benefit from consideration of the adoption or adaptation of some of the hiring, onboarding, and retention practices from across the private sector that are focused on creating a more engaging candidate experience. This initial examination provides a new way of thinking about the vetting process from the candidate point of view. The observations and suggestions provided in this report provide a framework to present the factors that may contribute to a positive candidate experience across the pre-initial vetting phase (factors that influence candidate awareness, organizational attraction, and job consideration), the initial vetting phase (candidate "conversion" to apply to a position and ongoing relationship management), and the post-initialvetting phase (including entry on duty, onboarding, retention, and future job mobility).

"Poor employee performance and employee misconduct are important workforce management issues for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to address given both their prevalence and potential impact on productivity. In light of the resources required to remove an individual with full employment rights from civil service, the probationary period for someone with a new civil service appointment is regarded as both the final step in the hiring process and an important tool for supervisors to address poor performance and misconduct. This report summarizes the results of a congressionally mandated independent review of DoD's use of the two-year probationary period for new appointments to the Senior Executive Service (SES) and competitive service, covering the required report elements listed in Section 1102 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020. The findings address the composition of the workforce on probation and those terminated during their probationary periods; patterns in probationary period terminations and disciplinary actions; concerns and promising practices related to the probationary period; and the perceived impact of an extended probationary period on recruiting and retention. The report also includes recommendations intended to improve how DoD uses the probationary period and assesses its impact. This research should be of interest to congressional representatives and staff, DoD personnel who conduct civilian personnel management and oversight, and the broader community interested in federal civilian personnel management."--

The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks. Sustained, coordinated efforts by the United States and its allies are necessary to deter and defeat modern threats, including Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and reconstituted forces and China's economic takeoff and concomitant military modernization. This report offers ideas on how to address shortcomings in defense preparations.

Debates in the United States about policy toward Taiwan tend to focus on the choice between strategic ambiguity and strategic clarity and how these options affect China's calculus on invading the island. The authors expand the discussion by considering how Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the Philippines would react to a range of policies the United States may choose to signal either an increase or a decrease in support to Taiwan. To do so, the authors reviewed each ally's historical relationship with Taiwan and the contemporary relations with the United States, China, and Taiwan. They also interviewed policymakers and experts in Japan, the ROK, and the Philippines about their views on hypothetical U.S. policy changes, including potential changes in U.S. diplomatic, intelligence, military, and economic relations with Taiwan. The authors find that Japan favors increases in many forms of U.S. diplomatic and military support to Taiwan and would adopt similar policies up to a point. The ROK and the Philippines favor the status quo and are less likely to increase support to Taiwan. All three allies oppose reductions in U.S. support to Taiwan, both because they believe it might lead to instability in the Taiwan Strait and because they would interpret reduced U.S. support to Taiwan as a signal of waning U.S. commitment to their own security. Such concerns would likely lead Japan and the ROK to try to draw the United States closer and increase defense spending. The Philippines' response would likely depend more on who is in power and China's recent behavior.

The increased frequency and severity of flooding in the United States are likely to increase the number of properties that experience multiple flood losses. However, only limited information is readily available on the characteristics of such properties despite being a significant driver of the claim costs of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). Data are available on the location of properties that have repeatedly flooded, for example, but information is not readily available on the cause of loss (coastal flooding or riverine flooding), structure type, the distribution of losses (multiple small losses or fewer large losses), losses relative to structure and property value, and attractive mitigation strategies for different types of properties. This report examines properties with multiple losses insured by the NFIP and the communities in which they are located to help inform decisions related to floodplain management, flood insurance, and mitigation efforts. This information should help (1) the NFIP better understand the specific challenges faced by these properties and the communities in which they are located, including consideration of equity issues, and (2) develop more-targeted mitigation programs and risk transfer strategies.

The authors of this report describe and analyze online information and potential misinformation about the security clearance process. Reviewing the content on internet forums reveals potential misperceptions about the process.

The authors examine Department of Defense (DoD) policy that governs how much time service members must spend at home relative to time spent deployed or mobilized. They suggest policy changes to inform and optimize DoD's force utilization decisions.

The purpose of training and education in the United States Department of the Air Force (DAF) is to develop and sustain mission-critical knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) among airmen, guardians, and civilians. The DAF must deliver effective training and education to fully use its human capital, provide warfighting assets to combatant commanders, and maintain asymmetric advantage over competitors. Yet training and education is costly. A recent budget request included more than $2 billion for training and education, and recent guidance has highlighted that the U.S. Air Force must transform all facets of training and education to field a highly capable force in an affordable manner. This report focuses on computational cognitive models, a class of training technologies with transformative potential. Computational cognitive models emulate psychological processes like knowledge acquisition and retention. These models have been used to develop empirically grounded training curricula and deliver personalized training in diverse domains. The primary benefits of using these models to deliver personalized training are enhanced learning gains and reduced training time. This report explores the feasibility of applying computational cognitive models to the acquisition and sustainment of mission-critical KSAs, with emphasis on second-language learning. The authors affirm that cognitive models can be integrated with training curricula in a variety of ways, and each of these potential courses of action (COAs) presents different levels of benefits along with different technical and logistical challenges.

"In this report, the authors use 11 case studies to create a typology of the barriers that impede U.S. security cooperation with highly capable allies and partners; identify some of the more specific barriers in the air, space, and cyber domains; suggest mitigation strategies for each of these barriers; and propose a preliminary approach for implementing some of these mitigation strategies"--

"The U.S. Army's newly renamed Soldier and Family Readiness Groups aim to increase Army family readiness and resilience. The authors of this report found that awareness of the new policy is not widespread among Army spouses, and aspects of the program could be improved. However, findings also suggest that these groups can be effective in the Army community"--

This report identifies barriers related to the Department of the Air Force's (DAF's) ability to attract and employ top civilian talent in six occupational series and explores strategies the DAF may be able to use to better compete for that talent.

This report explores the potential for competition and conflict among the United States, China, and Russia in Latin America; where competition might turn into conflict; what form that conflict might take; and the implications for the United States.

This paper shares the results of an exercise hosted by the RAND Corporation to explore the risk of escalation from Chinese activities in the gray zone to conventional war. The results showed an overall low risk of Taiwanese escalation.

The post-war reconstruction effort in Ukraine might be the largest post-war rebuilding effort in modern history. Both the United States and Europe have begun to plan for Ukraine's success. The authors of this report examine previous post-war and post-natural disaster reform and reconstruction efforts to draw lessons and inform policymakers. They also discuss security arrangements, which will be essential for the success of reconstruction. While reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan was more recent, Ukraine is fundamentally different. Instead, more-relevant lessons can be drawn from the truly transformative reform and reconstruction efforts in Western Europe following World War II, Central and Eastern Europe following the Cold War, and the Western Balkans following the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In all of these cases, the United States provided seed money and security, and the Europeans provided the bulk of the funding and advanced the process of European integration.

The authors of this report describe how to measure the impact of intermediate force capabilities (IFCs), which cause less-than-lethal effects, and how to better integrate them into wargaming, modeling, and simulation for U.S. and NATO-wide forces.

In this report, the authors develop a framework for assessing a country's capacity to resist a large-scale attack and then use that framework to assess Taiwan's capacity to resist such an attack by China long enough for U.S. forces to intervene.

Reducing the prevalence of all forms of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and child sexual exploitation, is a national priority that puts the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a prominent role. Given the scale, evolving nature, and complexity of labor trafficking, combating the problem poses a significant challenge. The DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) anti-human trafficking program is assessing the current state of and future needs for labor trafficking research in the United States. This effort will serve as a starting point for future social science-based S&T anti-human trafficking research and actions focused on labor trafficking. As part of this effort, DHS asked the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) to identify a scientifically sound research agenda that would leverage existing U.S. and international efforts to address the growing phenomenon of labor trafficking. HSOAC experts developed a research agenda through an extensive review of the literature and meetings with experts from academia and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and with stakeholders from DHS and other parts of the U.S. government (expert interviews). The research agenda identified the barriers that would need to be addressed and the questions that would need to be answered to promote operationally relevant, focused, applied social and behavioral science research that would inform decision- and policymakers and assist operational partners in mitigating the crimes of labor trafficking and human trafficking more broadly. This report describes the authors' methods, findings, and recommendations.

Scientific and technological competition has emerged as a front on which strategic competition between the United States and China is contested. Scientific and technological dominance-the prize of this competition-has been recognized as a national priority by high-level leadership from both countries. This dominance can be attained in two primary ways: A country can rely on its domestic scientific and technology innovation resources and activities, or it can leverage foreign scientific and technological assets. The researchers focused on the second approach for this study; in this report, they describe the benefits and liabilities associated with U.S.-Chinese scientific research collaboration. Specifically, the researchers investigated three types of flows between the United States and China: the inflow of U.S. technology inputs into Chinese military technology, the bilateral movement of scientific researchers between the United States and China, and scientific collaboration between researchers based in the United States and those based in China.

To weigh options in managing military personnel costs, the U.S. Air Force explores trade-offs in a workforce futures policy game that simulates the monetary and nonmonetary effects of workforce and personnel policies in real time.

This report explores the potential for competition among the United States, China, and Russia in the Middle East; where and why competition might turn into conflict; what form that conflict might take; and the implications for the United States.

As outer space becomes more congested, contested, and competitive, the risks to space safety, security, and sustainability heighten. Against this backdrop, the authors used a review of relevant literature and official documents, as well as interviews and workshops with subject-matter experts, to identify possible lessons for future space traffic management (STM) from past approaches to international traffic management and common resource management and offer recommendations to make progress in STM. Lessons from the history of the maritime and air domains and the development and implementation of international organizations within those domains help provide a pathway for the development of an international space traffic management organization (ISTMO). An ISTMO will need to achieve sufficient legitimacy and operational power to effectively manage the space domain.

The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program serves young people ages 16 to 18 experiencing difficulty in traditional high school. This report covers the program years 2021-2022 and is the seventh in a series on this quasi-military residential program.

China views psychological warfare, centered on the manipulation of information to influence adversary decisionmaking and behavior, as one of several key components of modern warfare. The U.S. military's increased focus on China and preparations for a potential U.S.-China conflict mean that it is important to understand how Chinese psychological warfare capabilities may evolve and what they would mean for Chinese strategic behavior in a crisis or conflict. The author explores Chinese military thinking about next-generation psychological warfare. China is interested in both advanced computing, such as big data, and brain science for their potential military applications to improve future psychological warfare capabilities. Leveraging a wide array of Chinese-language primary-source materials, the author provides an overview of Chinese thinking on psychological warfare, key capabilities, and related operational concepts that the Chinese military is pursuing and presents a hypothetical case study to illustrate how these capabilities, if realized, may be applied to a future U.S.-China contingency. One high-risk future scenario is if the Chinese military and broader leadership believes that these emerging technologies enable Beijing to predict or otherwise influence adversary decisionmaking. This could lead Beijing to have misplaced confidence in its ability to deter adversaries from fighting or coerce them to not fight at all.

This report, one of two, focuses on whether partners and allies have the willingness to support U.S. operations in a major Indo-Pacific conflict. The companion report focuses on technical and operational issues.