The following steps are recommended for consistent, efficient, and effective plans and means for improving the development of U.S. Air Force officers in their career fields: (1) identify the demand for jobs in the field grades-major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel; (2) ascertain the backgrounds that officers have accumulated (assess the supply); (3) compare supply with demand (gap analysis); and (4) plan ways to close the gaps.

This report examines the consequences of increasing the Navy depot's role in the logistics system by directing its resources toward the day-to-day needs of the fleet. Using a simulation that examined whether mission capability could be improved during a 90-day war through some combination of responsive stock management, proactive use of depot repair capabilities, and shortened transportation pipelines between carriers and depots, the authors found that priority repair at the depot can make on important difference in mission capability, that shortened pipelines can have large effects on mission capability, and that constructing an aviation consolidated allowance list (AVCAL) based on aircraft availability goals may offer promise for maximizing aircraft availability per dollar spent. The study also concluded that data synthesis is a missing ingredient in the Naval aviation logistics management system that inhibits the depot's ability to react quickly in support of sudden demand peaks.

This report discusses problems related to manning full-time support (FTS) positions in the Selected Reserve. The study focuses on systemic problems that currently exist and that would most likely exist even if the size and structure of the Selected Reserve were to change. It defines two premises that should underlie the services' process for determining FTS manpower requirements: there are alternative manpower structures that can accomplish any given workload, and there are no absolute workload requirements. It then outlines a three-part strategy for determining the best FTS structure: identify the work that should be done, identify alternative full-time manpower structures equally capable of completing the work, and estimate the cost of each alternative structure and select the least costly one.

To streamline its financial management system for spare parts, the Army is planning to implement a major initiative called Single Stock Fund (SSF). As part of this implementation, important decisions must be made on the adoption of new price and credit policies for spare parts. The purpose of stock funding is to set up a buyer-supplier relationship between operating units and the Army's wholesale supply system. Logistics customers in operating units receive an Operations and Maintenance Army (OMA) budget to buy spare parts from the wholesale supply system, and they receive credits when they return parts to the wholesale supply system for repair and/or restocking. The Army's wholesale supply system is financed by the Army Working Capital Fund (AWCF).' It must cover the cost of maintaining wholesale inventories with the income it receives from sales of parts to logistics customers and maintain a positive cash balance. Thus, price and credit policies affect the supply and repair decisions of logistics customers, as well as the financial health of the wholesale supply system. In the spring of 1998, the Army established a Credit/Pricing Integrated Product Team (CPIPT) to recommend several alternative pricing and credit policies and a set of criteria by which to assess how these alternatives would affect key Army processes. RAND Arroyo Center was asked to conduct the assessment of these alternatives. This documented briefing presents the results of RAND's analysis of the CPIPT price and credit policy alternatives. We focus on two quantitative criteria. First, the new price and credit policy should enable logistics customers to maintain their current operating tempo (OPTEMPO) without significantly increasing their OMA budget for spare parts. Second, the new policy should not significantly increase the AWCF's costs to replenish wholesale inventories through repair and procurement.

This Note describes the Enriched Airman Gain/Loss (EAGL) file, an annually prepared data file that supports the Air Force's Enlisted Force Management System. The file contains longitudinal data on every airman who was on regular active duty in the Air Force any time between June 30, 1971, and June 30, 1987. The Note describes each of the data fields on the EAGL file, identifies the data source, and lists the possible data codes and their meanings. The Air Force maintains the EAGL file and updates it annually with data on airmen who were in the Air Force during the preceding twelve months.

As the Army has implemented initiatives to improve its basic logistics processes, it has found that these processes are hampered by a financial management system that is slow and inaccurate and that creates errors and delays. This report documents analysis supporting the Army's effort to improve its logistics financial management (FM) processes using Velocity Management's Define-Measure-Improve methodology. In defining the FM process, researchers developed process maps that showed that the delivery of conflicting information from the supply and finance systems forces units to create time-consuming, manual reconciliation processes to determine their remaining budgets. Researchers identified metrics to measure performance. To improve the quality of price and credit information and eliminate the need for manual reconciliation, the researchers recommended that when a transaction is first undertaken the prices and credits should be used for all records of the transaction.

The cybersecurity of election systems has long been a central focus of election officials and the federal government, starting with the passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002 and, more recently, in 2017 with the designation of elections as a critical infrastructure subsector. Federal partners in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology are supporting the election community, including election officials and vendors, to improve cybersecurity. More recently, this focus has expanded to concerns about the supply chain of components that are integral to election system equipment. This concern for the cybersecurity of supply chains is found throughout industry as organizations strive to protect their equipment and customers from cyber threats. In this Perspective, RAND Corporation researchers lay out the considerations for securing election system supply chains against cyber threats and how the federal government can partner with state and local officials and the vendor community to understand where risk lies in the supply chain. The Perspective discusses how existing tools and approaches can be adapted and used to facilitate cyber supply chain risk management. It should be of interest to federal, state, and local election officials who will manage their relationships with the manufacturers of election equipment; to manufacturers that will, in turn, manage their relationships with their suppliers; and to those developing tools for mapping supply chains and assessing supply chain risk.