rand corporation jun 2023 (10 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In this report, the authors offer a preliminary conception of how to determine the capabilities the United States needs to remain safe from international terrorism.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The U.S. military has a long history of vaccinating service members against infectious disease as a military necessity to protect soldiers and contribute to the overall mission readiness of the force. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has once again demonstrated the importance of the health and readiness of the force. In this report, the authors examine how the Department of Defense (DoD) COVID-19 vaccination program was developed and implemented, determine how previous DoD vaccination programs influenced those decisions, and identify opportunities to strengthen the department's vaccination program, particularly against emerging infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. They examine the laws and policies that guide the overall DoD vaccination program, study lessons learned from other DoD vaccination programs, and determine the policies for handling medical and administrative (including religious) exemptions. The authors also created an exploratory framework for considering vaccine acceptability-including the key attributes of a vaccination campaign-which could provide an important basis for thinking about how to manage future DoD vaccination campaigns.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In the wake of the Taliban takeover and the reestablishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in August 2021, there are significant questions about the best methods to interpret Taliban messaging. Better interpretation would, in turn, help U.S. and Western policymakers to better understand Taliban leadership intentions and would thus allow for better-informed U.S. and Western policy decisions regarding Afghanistan. Limited direct diplomatic contact between the Taliban and most Western governments necessitates reliance on alternative sources of information. Taliban use of social media, particularly Twitter, was identified as one way to understand Taliban thinking. The authors of this report examine Taliban leadership use of Twitter in various regional languages and in English. Focusing on three areas-the economy, relationships with other militant groups and neighboring countries, and the status of women in Afghan society-the authors sought to clarify the messaging broadcast via this medium and to determine whether messaging differed by language used. The authors found no overall strategy behind Taliban social media use and no strong evidence that Taliban social media activity is coordinated at a high level. Messages appear designed to inform, persuade, and influence a target audience. On some issues, messaging was common across languages; in other cases, the messages were distinctly different, reflecting Taliban interest in tailoring a message for a specific audience without regard to potential contradictions by other individuals or among the various languages.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - At Congress's request, RAND researchers assessed the progress that the commercial spaceflight industry has made in adopting voluntary safety standards, the industry's progress in meeting key metrics set by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017, and whether the industry has matured such that areas identified in FAA reports are ready for regulatory action. The Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 imposes a moratorium on safety regulations until October 1, 2023. The FAA will be authorized to propose and issue regulations upon expiration of the moratorium (if it is allowed to expire). The RAND team reviewed the existing literature and public data. They also conducted interviews with subject-matter experts and stakeholders across the space domain, including government, industry, and standards development organizations. In the authors' assessment, the readiness of the commercial space industry for regulation, or for further development of voluntary consensus standards, does not only depend on the progress of adopting standards and meeting metrics. Regulatory readiness depends also on five key factors: access to, and understanding of, the regulatory process; security of regulatory support; the effectiveness of the regulatory support for the technology; environmental effects, costs, and security issues related to the regulation; and the ability to pass the regulation. The authors found that regulatory action is appropriate in the following form: allowing the moratorium to expire as per current law, continuing the development of voluntary consensus standards, and instituting Space Aerospace Rulemaking Committees. These regulatory actions should be accompanied by additional resourcing of the FAA.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Researchers evaluated the Federal Emergency Management Agency's terrorism risk formula, which considers threat, vulnerability, and consequences of terrorist attacks for allocating resources to the Homeland Security Grant Program.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This report supports the U.S. Army's effort to rethink its roles and responsibilities to meet the demands of competition with near peers below the threshold of armed conflict.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) installations have been affected by extreme weather events, such as wind and flood damage from Hurricane Sally at Naval Air Station Pensacola and flooding from severe storms at Offutt Air Force Base. More-frequent and less-extreme events, such as recurrent flooding or hailstorms, also disrupt DoD missions and result in considerable financial loss. DoD needs a way to compare the damage costs resulting from extreme weather events against the costs of mitigating that damage through enhanced installation resilience. There is currently no DoD-validated model or method for systematically comparing climate hazard damage costs against the costs of investing in resilience options. This report begins to address this gap by assessing the relevance and limitations of this one analytic approach. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and/or severity of extreme weather events, but it is difficult to predict with certainty which installations will be hit and when, or even by what type of hazard. It is important for DoD to account for this uncertainty by setting priorities for where and how much to invest in installation resilience to climate-driven hazards. Tools such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's natural hazard analysis tool (Hazus) could be used to further understanding of the value of investing in installation resilience to climate-driven hazards. In 19 case studies, the annualized cost of a resilience option was compared with the averted damage over that option's lifetime under a variety of disaster scenarios to screen for potentially attractive resilience investment options.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The physical environment in which the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) must operate is being affected by climate hazards, which adversely affect the performance of the joint force and the systems that support it. Generating, maintaining, and even increasing force readiness in light of changing climate threats is a key component of meeting high-level U.S. strategic goals, from defending the homeland to deterring aggression and strategic attacks. Acknowledging that climate effects are likely to become more severe as global temperatures rise, the authors of this report discuss the results of an initial study they conducted to develop links between climate and readiness, laying the groundwork for the eventual integration of climate risk with quantitative readiness assessment and decisionmaking to help ensure that military forces can reliably and affordably sustain needed readiness in a changing climate. A key contribution of the study is a climate readiness framework for understanding the risk to readiness that may result from a combination of (1) exposure to climate hazards, such as drought, flooding, wildfire, and tropical storms, and (2) the underlying vulnerability of readiness inputs-i.e., people, training, equipment, and force projection-to such hazard exposure.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The Great Recession began in 2007, when a contraction in the U.S. housing market led to widespread losses in the financial sector and, subsequently, to economic shocks around the world. By December 2007, the country was officially in recession, and it would not emerge from this contraction for 18 months. Although national security decisionmaking was not immediately affected by the recession, uncertainties created by short-term political measures to address the deficit meant that DoD had to fundamentally reconsider its ways and means of ensuring national security in the 2010s. This history considers the Great Recession's reverberations on the DoD as senior leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Staff worked to shift from a decade of counterterrorism operations toward future threats amid a dynamic threat environment and budgetary uncertainty.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The Department of Defense has hypothesized that future demand for uncrewed systems (UxS) will strain the capacity of the defense industrial base (DIB). This report contains an analysis of UxS demand and recommendations on strengthening the DIB.