A Strong and Ready Joint Force

A healthy, trained, and ready national security workforce is the underlying element of U.S. national security.

Decades of defense analyses by the Personnel, Readiness, and Health Program have helped civilian and uniformed DOW leaders manage recruiting and retention crises, transition to an all-volunteer force, execute the post–Cold War drawdown and post–9/11 buildup, and refresh practices around talent management, force readiness, and harmful behaviors. NSRD’s research portfolio equips policymakers with the information required to make difficult decisions about the joint force.

Some of NSRD’s recent cross-cutting research questions related to the readiness of the joint force include:

• What policies, investments, and initiatives need to be taken to ensure the strength of the nation’s All-Volunteer Force in the decades ahead?
• What is the Navy’s optimal Active Component-Reserve Component (AC-RC) force mix for certain missions considering a range of factors such as demands for forces, policies and processes governing access and readiness, personnel availability, training requirements, and cost?
• How effective will Trusted Workforce initiatives be in determining who should—or should not—have access to classified information? How is this effectiveness different than under a process of periodic reinvestigations?

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  Trust, But Verify: Reforming Personnel Vetting and the Security Clearance Process

  RAND researchers have examined a host of issues related reforming and improving the personnel vetting and security clearance process, and the national security secrecy paradigm more broadly.

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  Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Military Health Readiness Assessments

  The Department of Defense implements a suite of health assessments to monitor service members' medical readiness. Some of the content of the assessments overlaps, and the required time frames for completion can be very close to one another. What are potential opportunities for improvement?

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  Understanding and Improving Civilian Employer Experiences with Guard and Reserve Duty

  Researchers updated and extended an earlier study to document the views of employers of reserve component (RC) members and reevaluate Department of Defense (DoD) policy, federal legislation, and state legislation. For this study, the researchers integrated the results of a multimethod approach that included interviews with subject-matter experts and RC members and the fielding of the 2022 DoD National Survey of Employers.

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  Intellectual Firepower: Reviewing the DoD Education System

  How does the professional military education system within the U.S. Department of Defense operate? How does it compare with civilian institutions? And how can this system better align with the Pentagon's needs?

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  The Employment Effects of the My Career Advancement Account Scholarship for Military Spouses

  Spouses of active-duty service members face challenges in the civilian labor market compared with their peers in nonmilitary households because of deployments and frequent moves. The U.S. Department of Defense’s My Career Advancement Account Scholarship assists spouses in getting training for portable careers. RAND researchers found that the scholarship did increase employment among users for at least seven years after the program began

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  Wisdom in DoD

  Assisted by contractors as mentors and instructors, U.S. Army service members work together at Army Software Factory to produce products. When they rotate out, those soldiers take their knowledge, understanding, and wisdom with them, bringing indispensable absorptive capacity to the modern battlefield.