Stephanie Young is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and director of the Resource Management Program at RAND Project AIR FORCE. She manages a diverse portfolio of research in support of the Department of the Air Force on topics related to acquisition, logistics, industrial base, sustainment, installations/infrastructure, and organizational design. Her primary research interests relate to defense acquisition; budgeting; the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution system (PPBE); and broader resource allocation decisionmaking, but other recent work has focused on strategic competition, security cooperation and building partner capacity, countering-weapons of mass destruction, and U.S. policy in the Middle East and South Asia. In 2012 she spent three months as an analyst embedded with the Special Operations Joint Task Force–Afghanistan, in Kabul. At RAND she also taught a Ph.D. level course on the U.S. defense budget at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and she previously served as the associate research department director of RAND's Defense and Political Sciences Department. She was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.D. in history and a B.A. in physics and astrophysics.
Selected Publications
Connable, Ben, Stephanie Young, Stephanie Pezard, Andrew Radin, Raphael S. Cohen, Katya Migacheva, and James Sladden, Russia's Hostile Measures: Combating Russian Gray Zone Aggression Against NATO in the Contact, Blunt, and Surge Layers of Competition, RAND Corporation (RR-2539), 2020
Young, Stephanie, J. Michael Gilmore, Operating Under a Continuing Resolution: A Limited Assessment of Effects on Defense Procurement Contract Awards, RAND Corporation (RR-2263), 2019
Larson, Eric V., Derek Eaton, Michael E. Linick, John E. Peters, Agnes Gereben Schaefer, Keith Walters, Stephanie Young, H. G. Massey, and Michelle D. Ziegler, Defense Planning in a Time of Conflict: A Comparative Analysis of the 2001–2014 Quadrennial Defense Reviews, and Implications for the Army, RAND Corporation (RR-1309-A), 2018
Young, Stephanie, Daniel Tremblay, and Roland J. Yardley, The U.S. Department of Defense's Earned Value Management–Analyst Workforce, RAND Corporation (RR-1254), 2016
Young, Stephanie, Henry H. Willis, Melinda Moore, and Jeffrey Engstrom, Measuring Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) Performance: Capacities, Capabilities, and Sustainability Enablers for Biorisk Management and Biosurveillance, RAND Corporation (RR-660), 2014
Brennan, Rick, Jr., Charles P. Ries, Larry Hanauer, Ben Connable, Terrence K. Kelly, Michael J. McNerney, Stephanie Young, Jason H. Campbell, and K. Scott McMahon, Ending the U.S. War in Iraq: The Final Transition, Operational Maneuver, and Disestablishment of United States Forces-Iraq, RAND Corporation (RR-232), 2013
Stephanie Young, ""Would Your Answers Spoil My Questions?": Art and Technology at the RAND Corporation," in Volker Janssen (ed.), Where Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, University of California Press, 2012
National Defense Research Institute,, Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: An Update of RAND's 1993 Study, RAND Corporation (MG-1056-OSD), 2010