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Crowdsourcing technologies, strategies and methods offer new opportunities for bridging existing gaps among law, policymaking, and the lived experience of citizens. In recent years, a number of initiatives across the world have applied crowdsourcing to contexts including constitutional reform, drafting federal bills, and generating local policies. However, crowd-civic systems also come with challenges and risks such as socio-technical barriers, marginalization of specific groups, silencing of interests, etc. Using a designthinking approach, this workshop will address both opportunities and challenges of crowd-civic systems to develop best practices for increasing public engagement with law and policy. The workshop organizers will suggest an initial framework explicitly intended to be criticized by participants and reconfigured through a series of iterative cooperative small-group activities focusing on “diagnosing” the failures of past crowd-civic system efforts and the successes of online action around social issues. While the ultimate objective of the workshop is to develop a best practices guide, we see iterations on the guide as a mechanism for fostering community and collaboration among policymakers, technologists, and researchers around crowd-civic systems for law and policy.

Continuing concern about large cost overruns in a broad range of major defense programs led Congress to pass new laws extending the ambit of the existing Nunn- McCurdy Act, stipulating that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) review and report on the factors affecting program costs. In accordance with the revised Nunn- McCurdy Act, the office of Performance Assessments and Root Cause Analysis (PARCA) must provide its root cause explanation as part of a 60-day program review triggered when the applicable military department secretary reports a breach. In March 2010, in view of staffing limitations, the newly created PARCA within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) elected to rely on federally funded research and development center support in discharging its new responsibilities. Since then, PARCA engaged the RAND Corporation to conduct multiple studies on the root causes of Nunn-McCurdy breaches or other large cost increases in nine major defense acquisition programs: the Wideband Global Satellite, Longbow Apache, the Zumwalt-class destroyer (DDG-1000), the Joint Strike Fighter, Excalibur, the Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radio, the Navy Enterprise Resource Planning, Global Hawk, and the P-8A Poseidon.1 In addition to reports on major defense acquisition programs, RAND, at the request of the sponsor, has researched topics related to the management of defense acquisition. These topics include program manager tenure, oversight of acquisition category II programs, framing assumptions, programs with multiple Nunn-McCurdy breaches, and an analysis of the Joint Tactical Radio System Wideband Networking Waveform and Long Term Evolution Waveform developments.2 This report considers two topics in an attempt to enable DoD to be more proactive in avoiding Nunn-McCurdy breaches. The first topic explores the incentives in defense contracts, seeking to determine whether better alternatives exist to the ones presently used. The second topic involves analyzing

During the most recent rounds of Base Closure and Realignment Commission activities in 2005, a significant number of training bases were closed. In light of the introduction of new technologies and the great expansion of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) in the force, Department of Defense planners and some in Congress have become concerned that the existing training infrastructure bases and their training support facilities may not be adequate to train UAS air and ground components and the ground forces that use such equipment to capitalize fully on their capabilities. Accordingly, the Deputy Director, Readiness and Training Policy and Programs in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OUSD [P&R]) asked the RAND Corporation to assess the adequacy of UAS training to support current and future requirements. In addition, the House Armed Services Committee report accompanying the Fiscal Year 2013 National Defense Appropriations Act raised a number of questions concerning training strategies with particular reference to the use of simulators to facilitate training.1 This report considers three issues: (1) the development of a general concept for UAS training in the context of current and anticipated future UAS inventories, (2) the development of an appropriate framework based on the general concept to address UAS training requirements, including the appropriate use of simulators, and (3) the airspace requirements necessary for UAS training. The research reported on here covers UASs in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps as fielded and plans as they existed during 2012. A RAND team carried out extensive field visits to understand the current ability of the services to conduct (1) service- specific training and (2) joint training at both home station and joint training facilities.

The evolution of NIU resulted in two major institutional challenges: the need to change perceptions within the IC, and the need to establish NIU's role and responsibilities within the IC. Although NIU has a 50-year history of exclusively military intelligence education, it is now committed to educational excellence for the entire IC. Additionally, NIU awards master's degrees every year to students who have completed thesis research. Currently, these students work with CSIR and NIU faculty to determine research topics and locations in the IC where they can conduct their thesis research. There are no formally established collaborative relationships for this purpose. To help NIU and CSIR address their charge of conducting interagency research, we conducted a survey of entities within the IC that either produce or consume research to gain insight into where collaboration activities might take place, what types of collaboration would be feasible, and what the potential topics for research are. Within the agencies of the IC, there are a number of what we have termed research entities-- offices, divisions, units, or groups that conduct research. (Appendix B offers a list and descriptions of these entities.) Because research is the primary focus of these entities (although some are responsible for additional mission tasks in analysis, operations, support, etc.) we determined that concentrating on these entities would yield meaningful information with regard to interagency research collaboration.

This paper suggests an approach for how the Department of Defense (DoD) might execute deep reductions in the defense budget, deep enough that stated defense strategy could not be fully resourced. The cuts examined go beyond the $487 billion announced in January 2012 by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The authors do not argue for or against further reductions. They posit that the ongoing pressure to reduce the federal budget deficit may mandate further reductions in the DoD budget. In this context, they suggest starting from a strategic basis in determining the reductions, prioritizing challenges, and identifying where to accept more risk in the process. The paper demonstrates this method with three illustrative strategic directions that might guide the department in choosing which forces and programs to reduce or to protect while making explicit the risks involved. It builds on the strategic guidance of January 2012, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense.1 It is intended to inform the debate that will likely take place over the coming months, and years, on how to cope with pressure to reduce the defense budget further while limiting risk to U.S. national security. This research was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted within the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute (NDRI), a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community. For more information on the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center.

As a result of continuing concern with large cost overruns in a broad range of major defense programs, Congress enacted new statutory provisions extending the ambit of the existing Nunn-McCurdy Act. In accordance with the revised Nunn-McCurdy law, the Performance Assessments and Root Cause Analysis (PARCA) office must provide its root cause explanation as part of a 60-day program review triggered when the breach is reported by the applicable military department secretary. This report does two things. First, it analyzes the root cause of cost overruns in two programs: the Army Excalibur artillery round and the Navy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The Excalibur project incurred a Nunn-McCurdy breach. The ERP did not, but the cost growth was so great that the Department of Defense (DoD) requested a root cause analysis. Second, it presents what can be described as an exercise to help identify the most critical features of a program. Critical program components are those that carry the most risk of overall program failure. The exercise is designed to identify the important program features that decisionmakers would want to concentrate on when inquiring about a program as it develops over time. The report then uses the results of the exercise to flag the most critical features of the weapon system, using Excalibur as an example. The exercise and the illustration help to frame one approach for considering program failure risk in programs that have not yet breached.

Identifying the appropriate balance between contractor and government staff is not a new challenge for the government. However, recent direction from Department of Defense (DoD) leadership has led to increased awareness of the importance of finding this balance. In his fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget message, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates called for growing the civilian workforce by replacing contractors with DoD civilian personnel. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, DoD's ongoing in-sourcing efforts were described as a means of establishing a balanced total workforce . . . that more appropriately aligns public and private sector functions. In August 2010, Secretary Gates called for a halt to the creation of Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) positions to replace contractor staff after FY 2010. Although some may have believed that in-sourcing efforts were to be ceased, additional guidance clarified that in-sourcing efforts would continue. A three-year hiring freeze was implemented at OSD, the combatant commands, and the defense agencies, but in-sourcing was allowed to continue in the military departments. The research conducted by the RAND Corporation reviewed the recent history of outsourcing and in-sourcing and assessed the current laws and policies pertaining to in-sourcing to develop a framework and methodology for applying the current laws and policies to arrive at a decision about in-sourcing. This research was initially undertaken as part of an insourcing assessment for a U.S. Navy organization. However, during research, we discovered a gap in the current in-sourcing guidance, and individuals tasked with in-sourcing still appeared to be struggling to interpret and implement this guidance. This report interprets commonly used terms, such as inherently governmental, and describes an approach to implementing current in-sourcing guidance.