Assumption Based Planning

Report

Developing New Future Scenarios for the U.S. Coast Guard's Evergreen Strategic Foresight Program

The U.S. Coast Guard's Evergreen strategic foresight initiative works to identify emerging service challenges that require focus in the near term. This report describes an approach to developing future scenarios to aid in that process.

Tool

A Wargame Method for Assessing Risk and Resilience of Military Command-and-Control Organizations

Guide to conducting a command-and-control (C2) risk and resilience tabletop exercise, a new wargaming method of assessing metrics for C2 structures in terms of risks from adversary efforts or the operational environment and resilience to those risks.

Report

Estimating Air Force Deployment Requirements for Lean Force Packages: A Methodology and Decision Support Tool Prototype

This report describes a methodology and prototype tool -- the Lean Strategic Tool for the Analysis of Required Transportation (Lean-START) -- that can explore trade-offs among capability (or risk), speed, and cost to create force packages for deployment.

News Release

China and U.S. Can Reduce the Risk of War by Learning from History's Blunders

The history of wars caused by misjudgments reveals that leaders relied on cognitive models, or simplified representations of their worlds, that were seriously at odds with objective reality. China and the U.S. could learn from historical strategic blunders regarding war and peace, and four examples of decisions that turned out well.

Report

China and U.S. Can Reduce the Risk of War by Learning from History's Blunders

The history of wars caused by misjudgments reveals that leaders relied on cognitive models, or simplified representations of their worlds, that were seriously at odds with objective reality. China and the U.S. could learn from historical strategic blunders regarding war and peace, and four examples of decisions that turned out well.

Report

Analysis to Inform Defense Planning Despite Austerity

Defense analysis can better serve policymakers by exploiting improvements in the state of the art and by rediscovering and supplementing classic principles. These relate to multiple objectives and hedging against uncertainty.

Report

Applying Lessons from National Security Planning Under Uncertainty

A first step in dealing with uncertainty is confronting its existence, ubiquity, and magnitude. A second step is dealing with it when informing assessments and decisions. Lessons from RAND's national security work on planning under uncertainty can be applied in many other fields.

Report

Making Strategic Analysis Matter

A presentation of the topics and findings discussed at a workshop convened to examine how consumers of intelligence might be better served by analysis whose focus is longer term or more strategic than most of today's intelligence products.

Report

How Americans Will Live and Work in 2020: A Workshop Exploring Key Trends and Philanthropic Responses

These proceedings summarize the discussion at a July 2011 workshop convened to examine how trends in four areas -- the economy, demographics, the workplace, and lifestyles -- will affect the poor and vulnerable in America in the coming decade.

Report

Comparing Alternative U.S. Counterterrorism Strategies

The U.S. faces the challenge of countering the terrorism threat. Frequently, both expert decisionmakers and lay citizens have trouble assessing alternative strategies to address such issues because of the emotions and uncertainty involved. An assumption-based planning approach might help.

Commercial Book

Assumption-Based Planning: A Tool for Reducing Avoidable Surprises

This book presents a variety of techniques for rooting out those vulnerable, crucial assumptions that, through familiarity or other reasons, have become buried in one's thinking.

Research Brief

Balancing Strategy, Forces, and Resources: Lessons for the Current Defense Review

Change in the international environment and the nature of threats to U.S. interests-as well as the size of defense budgets-have placed tremendous strain on the U.S. policymakers who sought to achieve a balance between strategy, forces, and resources.

Report

Defense Planning in a Decade of Change: Lessons from the Base Force, Bottom-Up Review, and Quadrennial Defense Review

This report describes the challenges policymakers have faced as seen through the lens of the three major force structure reviews that have taken place over the past decade.

Report

Assumption-Based Planning and Force XXI

The current codification of Force XXI is in TRADOC PAM 525-5 dated 10 December 1993. RAND was asked to apply its Assumption-Based Planning (ABP) methodology to that version to assess its robustness into the future.

Report

Assumption-Based Planning: A Planning Tool for Very Uncertain Times

This report documents a strategic planning methodology, Assumption-Based Planning, that RAND has developed over the last four years.

Journal Article

Elasticities of Substitution and Constant-Output Demand Curves for Labor

This paper presents a method for estimating the elasticity of demand for labor with output held constant.

People

Brien Alkire

People

Felipe De Leon

People

Steven W. Popper