Christopher Paul

RAND Corporation | RAND · RAND National Security Research Division

The Marine Corps Information Operations Center (MCIOC) conducts an Information Warfighter Exercise (IWX) — an event designed to provide training on operations in the information environment (IOE) — one to two times per year. MCIOC asked RAND to help develop a structured wargame for IWX with a formal adjudication process. This document contains the...

This chapter describes narrative‐related research for the US Marine Corps and then highlights corresponding challenges for social‐behavioral modeling.

Recent high-profile outbreaks, such as Ebola and Zika, have illustrated the transnational nature of infectious diseases. Countries that are most vulnerable to such outbreaks might be higher priorities for technical support. RAND created the Infectious Disease Vulnerability Index to help U.S. government and international agencies identify these coun...

Historically, insurgency is one of the most prevalent forms of armed conflict and it is likely to remain common in the foreseeable future. Recent experiences with counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan offer many lessons for future counterinsurgents, but the discourse on the subject continues to be mired in a traditional dichotomy pitting popula...

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring be-tween 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualita-tive/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivari-ate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could...

The authors study the 30 insurgencies occurring between 1978 and 2008 using four methods crossing the qualitative/quantitative divide. The four approaches are narrative, bivariate comparison, comparative qualitative analysis, and K-medoids clustering. The quantification of qualitative data allows the authors to compare more cases than they could “h...

One of the reasons offered for gaps in organizations’ cyber security is the lack of a “cyber security culture.” This article defines and explores the concept of cyber security culture within the context of the U.S. Army. It concludes that the Army would benefit from the creation and adoption of a cyber security culture, though it would not be a sec...

We use Charles Ragin's Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to quantitatively test the performance of 20 distinct counterinsurgency (COIN) approaches against the historical record. This method allowed us to apply mathematical principles to fundamentally qualitative data without compromising the qualitative nuance necessary to identify and resolve...

Without entering the debate about exactly what strategic communication is or should be, this article enumerates challenges facing efforts to inform, influence, and persuade in pursuit of national policy objectives first for the U.S. government in general, and then specific to the Department of Defense. With the problem space thus defined, the artic...

Violent drug-trafficking organizations (VDTOs) in Mexico produce, transship, and deliver into the United States tens of billions of dollars worth of narcotics annually, but their activities are not limited to drug trafficking. VDTOs have also engaged in human trafficking, weapon trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering, extortion, bribery, rackete...

This volume in the Contemporary Military, Strategic, and Security Issues series presents a concise introduction to the evolution, key concepts, discourse, and future options for improved strategic communication in today's U.S. government. Strategic Communication: Origins, Concepts, and Current Debates is a groundbreaking study, the first book expli...

This article reviews and synthesizes social science knowledge on the connections between popular support and terrorist/insurgent sustainment. After distinguishing between “sympathetic of” and “supporting,” the author identifies support requirements of terrorists and insurgents, the range of sources of support, and motives for support. A scheme of r...

Insurgency has been the most prevalent form of armed conflict since at least 1949. Despite that fact, following the Vietnam War and through the balance of the Cold War, the U.S. military establishment turned its back on insurgency, refusing to consider operations against insurgents as anything other than a "lesser-included case" for forces structur...

Thirty cases of insurgency form the empirical foundation for this research. This monograph provides more detail on the cases analyzed in the accompanying volume, Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency. As a prelude to the case histories, we briefly elaborate on how the cases were selected, how the data were collecte...

This important work, edited by an expert on terrorism, focuses on the 21st-century struggle for strategic influence and ways in which states can neutralize the role of new media in spreading terrorist propaganda. In an era where anyone can have access to the Internet or other media forms that make widespread communication easy, terrorists and insur...

Although great strides have been made toward forecasting state-level instability, little progress has been made toward the prediction of outbreaks of urban unrest. This article presents a method for the assessment of cities’ vulnerability to large-scale urban unrest. Forty-five factors correlated with urban unrest are identified and weighted by an...

Using the events leading to the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and its subsequent impact on US military interventions as an empirical example, this article elaborates the notion of `legacy chains'. Expanding on the general notion of policy legacies, the discussion describes the effects that post-World War II US military interventions have had on eac...

Empirical evidence from the psychology literature suggests that reactions towards health shocks depend strongly on the personality trait of locus of control, which is usually unobservable to the analyst. In this paper, the role of this discrete heterogeneity in shaping the effects of health shocks on labour supply is theoretically modelled by adopt...

Considerable existing literature on terrorism contains limited discussions of what terrorists need to know in order to plan their attacks. This article focuses explicitly on terrorist information needs and specifies a list of intelligence requirements for attacks against the transportation infrastructure. This list is part of the modified intellige...

A no-nonsense treatment of information operations, this handbook makes clear what does and does not fall under information operations, how the military plans and executes such efforts, and what the role of IO ought to be in the war of ideas. Paul provides detailed accounts of the doctrine and practice of the five core information operations capabil...

Paul explores both how and why U.S. military intervention decisions are made. Pursuit of that inquiry requires the identification of decision participants, thorough examination of the decision making processes they employ, and recognition of several factors that influence intervention decisions: the national interest, legitimacy, and the legacies o...

This research brief summarizes analysis that sought to identify how the Department of Defense obtains simulations and simulation training support, describing and evaluating an alternative approach using case summaries, open literature, and interviews.

This article seeks to explain both who participates in military intervention decisions and how they participate. The article argues that participation is strongly conditioned by the primary characteristics of the intervention, along with the organization and institutions of U.S. government bureaucracy. These organizational and institutional influen...

Chapter 1 Acknowledgments Chapter 2 Preface Chapter 3 1 Introduction: Elite Configurations after State Socialism Part 4 I: POLITICAL ELITE CHANGE Chapter 5 2 The Czech Republic: New Elites and Social Change Chapter 6 3 Slovakia: Elite Disunity and Convergence Chapter 7 4 Hungary: Elites and the Use and Abuse of Democratic Institutions Chapter 8 5 P...

This paper proposes a better strategy for arriving at answers to the critical question "why do states do what they do?" by focusing on and elaborating state autonomy theory. Proposing first that state autonomy is most effectively conceived as the interstices in the tensions between pluralistic institutional constraints and ruling class power influe...

Little is known about the health behaviors of church attendees. This article reviewed telephone interview data of 1,517 women who were church members from 45 churches located in Los Angeles County to determine their breast cancer screening status and to identify the key predictors of screening. Almost all of this sample (96%) reported attending chu...

Ongoing operations in the villages, towns, and cities of Afghanistan and Iraq offer the first real test of the United States' joint urban operations doctrine, which was published in 2002. The objective of this study was to reveal tools that will better enable military and civilian alike to meet national policy objectives best through more effective...

The U.S. Air Force has a long history of working with allies and partners in a security cooperation context to build the defense capacities of these nations, acquire and maintain access to foreign territories for operational purposes, and strengthen relationships with partner air forces for mutual benefit. However, it is often difficult to determin...

Countless studies, articles, and opinion pieces have announced that U.S. strategic communication and public diplomacy are in crisis and are inadequate to meet current demand. There is consensus that such capabilities are critical and that they need to be improved. This paper reviews contemporary thinking regarding the advancement of U.S. strategic...

The U.S. Navy trains its surface combatant ship crews through a combination of shore-based, onboard pier-side, and underway training. Much of this training has traditionally involved significant periods of underway time, which allows units to achieve required certifications and readiness levels. Underway training is expensive, however, because fuel...

The USAF, along with other DoD elements, has worked for many years with allies and friendly nations to build strong and enduring partnerships, reinforce other nations' capacity both to defend themselves and to work in coalitions, and ensure U.S. access to foreign territories for operational purposes. The activities conducted by the Air Force range...

This work grew out of earlier research that RAND conducted for Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) leadership. That earlier work, discussed in Keating and Gates (1999), focused on DFAS's internal cost structure and the implications that cost structure held for DFAS pricing policies. Because that research focused internally, the logical ne...

In the wake of the failure of the Joint Simulation System (JSIMS), the Department of Defense (DoD) sought improvements to its approach to buying simulations training through a process called the Training Capabilities Analysis of Alternatives (TC AoA). The DoD has decided to move forward with a prototype of one alternative developed as part of this...