January 2021
Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University
“U.S. research security requires trust and collaboration between those conducting R&D and the federal government. Most R&D takes place in the private sector, outside of government authority and control, and researchers are wary of federal government or law enforcement involvement in their work. Despite these challenges, as adversaries work to extract science, technology, data and know-how from the United States, the U.S. government is pursuing an ambitious research security initiative. In order to secure the 78 percent of U.S. R&D funded outside the government, authors Melissa Flagg and Zachary Arnold propose a new, public-private research security clearinghouse, with leadership from academia, business, philanthropy, and government and a presence in the most active R&D hubs across the United States.”
September 2020
Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University
“The United States must adopt a new approach to R&D policy to optimize the diversity of the current system, manage the risks of system dispersion and deliver the benefits of R&D to society. This policy brief provides a new framework for understanding the U.S. R&D ecosystem and recommendations for repositioning the role of the federal government in R&D.”
February 2015
Air University Press
“By the time he entered civil service, most of Marshall’s formative ideas about the practice of net assessment and his unique understanding of organizational behavior had emerged. Instinctively multidisciplinary, Marshall accrued a multitude of ostensibly different analytic lenses.”
1999
RAND Corporation
Contributors: Carl H. Builder, David C. Gompert, John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt, Michele Zanini, Jeremy Shapiro, Edward R. Harshberger, David A. Ochmanek, Brian Nichiporuk, Stephen T. Hosmer, et al.
“Advances in information technology have led us to rely on easy communication and readily available information — both in our personal lives and in the life of our nation. For the most part, we have rightly welcomed these changes. But information that is readily available is available to friend and foe alike; a system that relies on communication can become useless if its ability to communicate is interfered with or destroyed. Because this reliance is so general, attacks on the information infrastructure can have widespread effects, both for the military and for society. And such attacks can come from a variety of sources, some difficult or impossible to identify. This, the third volume in the Strategic Appraisal series, draws on the expertise of researchers from across RAND to explore the opportunities and vulnerabilities inherent in the increasing reliance on information technology, looking both at its usefulness to the warrior and the need to protect its usefulness for everyone. The Strategic Appraisal series is intended to review, for a broad audience, issues bearing on national security and defense planning.”
1994
RAND Corporation
“In 1951, the late Herbert Goldhamer, a senior RAND analyst, spent several months as an adviser to the United Nations team that was negotiating with the North Koreans and the Chinese at Panmunjom. Long classified, this now historic document is an unedited transcript of the observations Goldhamer dictated immediately after his return. Intended to capture impressions while they were still fresh, this lively account was to be the raw material for a later more systematic analysis. It offers the reader a firsthand look, through the eyes of an astute observer, at the roles that interpersonal relations and culturally based perceptions play in diplomatic negotiations. The volume includes a Foreword by Andrew W. Marshall and an Introduction by Ernest R. May.”
June 1990
RAND Corporation
“This document reports on how a bright and innovative group of people at the young RAND Corporation came to learn about military strategy and to make important contributions to that field in the first 15 years of the Corporation. It draws on memories, documents, discussions, and interviews. The account is organized loosely according to certain main ideas that came out of those fruitful years, with emphasis on the new field of nuclear strategy.”
May 1990
This paper contains “observations about the concept, the history, the…status, and future needs and prospects of net assessment [that] emerged” from a May 1990 symposium sponsored jointly by the Director, Net Assessment, and the president of the Institute for Defense Analyses. “The symposium was held as part of a thrust to help the DoD and IDA gain a deeper understanding of the significance of recently changing strategic conditions in world events, and of the implications of the changed conditions for DoD strategic planning. Net Assessment has been a part of the DoD planning landscape for many years. The key questions to which the symposium sought answers were how the activity has served the DoD in the past, and how it could continue to serve it in the future.”
April 1990
Memorandum No. 29 Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (JCSS)
This paper is based on a lecture presented at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies on August 17, 1989. At that time the author was a Visiting Fellow at the Center, as well as the Bradley Senior Research Associate at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.
“What follows represents only one line of thinking about net assessment, which we may define as “the craft and discipline of analyzing military balances.” From the first part of this definition an important characteristic of this approach becomes clear: net assessment, in this view, is not a science or anything close to it. Although net assessment may draw on various forms of quantitative analysis, it makes no pretense to the certainty (such as it is) of operations research, much less the hard sciences. Many do not share this view, and think that not only is scientific rigor, of the kind associated, let us say, with molecular biology, possible in this field, but that scientific progress characterizes it as well. My view is more pessimistic: a storehouse of wisdom about doing net assessments has been built up in the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and many statesmen and generals have, in the past, made superb net assessments. But there is no guarantee that accumulated good sense will survive in any bureaucracy, and individual genius appears and flourishes as it wills. What is worse, many of the approaches to net assessment that dominate contemporary academe, and to a lesser extent the public and contract research worlds are, in fact, profoundly destructive of sound net assessment.”
November 14, 1983
Secretary of Defense, Director of Central Intelligence
This declassified document, produced in 1983, is a joint net assessment by the Director of Central Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense. It examines aspects of the United States and Soviet Union’s strategic postures, including trends, asymmetries, and scenarios.
1972
RAND Corporation
“A suggestion for a shift in focus on planning and programming U.S. strategic forces. Long-term analysis of the U.S.-Soviet competition should be concerned with both opponents, treating threats within that framework, searching for areas of possible U.S. advantage, and looking for weaknesses as well as strengths. Current analysis focuses solely on warding off potential Soviet difficulties and advantages. It is doubtful that forces on either side develop in accordance with simply stated national goals. Analysis should incorporate the tools of Bayesian analysis and two-sided, force-posture planning games, similar to SAFE and XRAY. It should develop more comprehensive U.S. positions on composition of strategic forces, SALT, arms-control issues, the nature of the strategic arms competition, and general U.S. objectives. By leading away from concentration on a single criterion, the analysis could gain some freedom in planning.”