Who joins the Army, why, and how satisfied are they with their decisions? This study's portrayal of U.S. Army privates could serve as an educational tool for Army senior leadership, junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and prospective recruits.

"The cohesion of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)--defined here as the ability of the six GCC member states to act together or in parallel--has significant consequences for regional stability and U.S. interests. This report examines factors that bind and divide the six GCC states--Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates--and presents the outlook for the GCC's evolution over the next ten years. Addressing the political, economic, and security dimensions of GCC relationships, the study provides a framework for understanding intra-GCC dynamics, an expectation of future developments, and policy recommendations for enhancing stability and U.S. regional interests"--Publisher's description.

Over the past decade, the government has expanded funding and services to meet increasing demand for improved veteran access to high-quality mental health services. This report describes findings from a study designed to gather information on mental health-related needs facing veterans in the Detroit metropolitan area to identify gaps in the support landscape and inform future investments for community-level resources to fill the identified gaps.

The challenge of connecting employers and educators to collaboratively plan for training future workers is an enduring one-particularly for jobs that are rapidly changing because of technological advancements. This report addresses this challenge as it pertains to employers and educators in the oil and natural gas industry located in and around the Utica and Marcellus shales. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to tap natural gas has resulted in the Utica and Marcellus shales becoming major sources of natural gas supply within the United States and are predicted to bring significant long-term economic benefits to the tristate region of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. To inform policy decisions on how best to expand and sustain the pool of workers with knowledge and skills needed by oil and natural gas employers in the tristate region, this report summarizes the findings from surveys administered to the region's oil and gas employers and education providers. We found that basic cross-cutting skills-such as time management, speaking, and writing-and knowledge of business operations (including sales and marketing) are reported by employers as essential for their workers to competently perform in high-priority occupations. However, these basic skills tend not to be emphasized in local postsecondary degree programs that support the oil and natural gas industry. We also found a clear lack of collaboration and partnerships between oil and gas companies and education providers across the region, with colleges and employers each pointing to the other's unwillingness as the source for lack of partnerships or collaboration.

This volume tells the stories of six soldiers in their own words. While a separate RAND Arroyo Center report details the service experiences of 81 junior enlisted soldiers, this report provides deeper insight into the junior enlisted experience.

In response to the predicted potential loss of nearly a million affordable rental homes in the United States, the MacArthur Foundation in 2000 launched a large philanthropic initiative called Window of Opportunity (WOO) to preserve privately owned affordable rental housing. By 2011, the foundation had learned from its WOO recipients and affiliates that improvements in energy efficiency (EE) could enable residential building energy costs to be lowered, improving cash flow and, by extension, the viability of multifamily affordable rental housing. As a consequence, the foundation decided to invest in energy efficiency. From 2012 to 2015, the MacArthur Foundation awarded 39 grants and loans totaling $27.5 million to promote the energy efficiency of multifamily affordable rental housing. Awardees for these grants and loans spanned the real estate, energy, and environmental sectors. This evaluation confirms that there have been marked increases nationally since 2010 in investments in the energy efficiency of multifamily rental housing, including in the subset that is affordable. Interviews, grantee accomplishments, and two case studies indicate that, of the seven desired outcomes the foundation outlined for Window of Opportunity-Energy Efficiency (WOO-EE), the initiative's greatest contributions were to help improve cross-sector collaboration and to increase awareness of EE as a preservation tool for affordable multifamily rental housing. WOO-EE activities had a smaller positive influence on three more of the outcomes, had no appreciable influence on one of them, and had an unknown influence on another.