You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, many agencies within the federal government began restricting some of their publicly available geospatial data and information from such sources as the World Wide Web. As time passes, however, decisionmakers have begun to ask whether and how such information specifically helps potential attackers, including terrorists, to select U.S. homeland sites and prepare for better attacks. The research detailed in this book aims to assist decisionmakers tasked with the responsibility of choosing which geospatial information to make available and which to restrict.
As the U.S. National Defense Strategy recognizes, the United States is currently locked in a great-power competition with Russia. This report seeks to define areas where the United States can compete to its own advantage. It examines Russian vulnerabilities and anxieties; analyzes potential policy options to exploit them; and assesses the associated benefits, costs, and risks, as well as the likelihood of successful implementation.
Assessing alternative mixes of active and reserve forces is a crucial defense issue. Force structure decisions are made in an inherently uncertain environment: Force requirements can vary unpredictably, sometimes surging dramatically, depending on the types of conflicts that arise. The RAND SLAM program is a software application designed to aid military analysts in exploring the inherent trade-offs between cost, stress, and risk in force structure decisions. Its unique feature is that it models force requirements stochastically, allowing for analysis of requirements that change unpredictably over time. This report serves as a user's guide, explaining the program's features and interface and guiding the user through example analyses. Several of these example analyses examine some of the same force structure decisions as those analyzed with spreadsheet techniques by Lynn E. Davis et al. in Stretched Thin: Army Forces for Sustained Operations, thus validating the RAND SLAM results against this previous work. The authors also discuss the underlying model for the program, including its strengths and limitations and how it might be expanded and improved.
This volume chronicles RAND's involvement in researching insurgency and counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand during the Vietnam War era and assesses the effect that this research had on U.S. officials and policies. Elliott draws on interviews with former RAND staff and the many studies that RAND produced on these topics to provide a narrative that captures the tenor of the times and conveys the attitudes and thinking of those involved.
The emergence of the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) in the last two-thirds of the 1990s and continuing into the new century, has been a complex process intertwining politics, economics, national cultures, and numerous institutions. This book provides an essential background for understanding how security issues as between NATO and the European Union are being posed for the early part of the 21st century, including the new circumstances following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. This study should be of interest to those interested in the evolution of U.S.-European relations, especially in, but not limited to, the security field; the development of institutional relationships; and key choices that lie ahead in regard to these critical arrangements.
An “entertaining and fast-paced” account of the organization that defines the military-industrial complex—and continues to shape our world today (The New York Times Book Review). The RAND Corporation was born in the wake of World War II as a think tank to generate research and analysis for the United States military. It was a magnet for the best and the brightest—and also the most dangerous. RAND quickly became the creator of America’s anti-Soviet nuclear strategy, attracting such Cold War luminaries as Albert Wohlstetter, Bernard Brodie, and Herman Kahn, who arguably saved us from nuclear annihilation—and unquestionably created the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned a...
Strategy, at its best, knits together ends and means, no matter how various and disparate, into a cohesive pattern. In the case of a U.S. information strategy, this requires balancing the need to guard and secure access to many informational capabilities and resources, with the opportunity to achieve national aims by fostering as much openness as practicable. The authors' term to represent such strategic balancing is guarded openness. They go on to describe noopolitik (nu-oh-poh-li-teek)--an emerging form of statecraft that emphasizes the importance of sharing ideas and values globally, principally through the exercise of persuasive soft power rather than traditional military hard power. Thi...
Defence policy is of continuing interest and concern to all nations. There are armed conflicts and new threats. Difficult choices cannot be avoided. This book has three aims. First, to identify the typical questions raised by economists when studying defence policy. Second, to show how simple economic analysis can be used to answer these questions and contribute to our understanding of defence issues. Third, to provide a critical evaluation of defence policy.
By comparing modern counterinsurgency doctrine and operations to those of 1960s, this paper tests and ultimately disproves the assumption that doctrine as written and operations as conducted are tightly linked. Ingrained organizational concepts and beliefs have a much greater influence on operations than written doctrine, and altering these beliefs will require the U.S. military to reorient itself mentally as well as physically.