Böcker av Bradley Wilson

The Department of Defense (DoD) has hypothesized that the demand signal for uncrewed systems (UxS) in the coming years will strain the capacity of the U.S. defense industrial base (DIB). DoD asked the RAND Corporation to explore this possibility and assemble relevant risks, issues, and opportunities to support ongoing DoD activities, including complying with statutory requirements to provide annual reports to Congress. The scope of the request covered many types of UxS, including uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), uncrewed ground systems (UGSs), and maritime platforms-specifically, uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) and uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs). The authors consulted a variety of data sources and conducted interviews with officials from military UxS program offices, representatives from commercial entities, and subject matter experts. They examined fragility indicators, such as financial outlook, DoD sales, the number of firms in relevant sectors, and dependence on foreign sources of supply; and examined criticality indicators, such as defense uniqueness, design requirements, skilled labor needs, facility and equipment availability, materials and components with long lead times, and availability of alternatives. This report contains an analysis of required levels of autonomous UxS to meet DIB requirements, data on DIB categories and specific component elements within those categories, an assessment of the posture of the DIB to produce and sustain levels of UxS platforms as required by DoD, the results of a comparative analysis of near-peer nation-states China and Russia, and recommendations on strengthening the DIB.

U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command asked the RAND Corporation to assess the Marine Corps offensive cyber operations acquisition life cycle and identify ways to improve the transparency of related decisionmaking. The authors brought together data on operational capability, scheduling, and risk to develop a life-cycle cost-estimating framework. This framework should help Joint Cyber Weapons (JCW) program leadership understand the potential costs and provide additional guidance on budgeting considerations. It incorporates five classes of inputs and has three types of outputs. In creating the framework, the authors considered the demand for exploits from the operational user, as well as the type of cyber weapon (e.g., exploit, implant, payload), the weapon's target environment (e.g., desktop or mobile systems), vulnerability decay rate, the adversary's defense capabilities, weapon cost, and how various acquisitions are phased in and out of service over time. The framework also addresses the production of cyber weapons, their costs, and how uncertainties are distributed over a specified period. The authors conducted exploratory modeling and simulation to better understand associated uncertainties and model inputs.