RAND

What will define the next 75 years of the Western alliance? Before last week's summit, we asked 30 RAND researchers about the major challenges facing NATO today—and what opportunities the alliance could seize to help secure its future. Here's what our experts said.

This new study compares the prevalence of respiratory disease diagnoses (e.g., lung cancer, COPD) and symptoms (e.g., wheezing, activity limitations) for veterans and civilians at different ages.

I'm excited to share my latest piece in The Hill on Black Americans Battling #Disinformation. It combines my research on race and voting behavior with my work at RAND on countering #TruthDecay. Disinformation campaigns are on the rise, and it's crucial to recognize and deal with these tactics. Read more about the challenges voters face and the steps we can take to protect the integrity of information. https://lnkd.in/e4Fiwndf

Rapid yet responsible technological advancement is a lofty goal. But according to RAND's Douglas Yeung, AI companies will likely come up short if they "fall prey to a fundamental human flaw: refusing to heed hard truths from those who would know."

In today’s #WSJ, I argue that the global IT outage sparked by the #CrowdStrike update is more than an inconvenience, it’s a warning call. The outage reveals how fast critical vulnerabilities can ripple across our interconnected world. We need to better identify and manage the systemic risk posed by individual firms. I call back to the 2008 financial crisis (as I'm prone to do) and lessons learned on "too big to fail" and successes on identifying and monitoring systemically important banks. We're now seeing that certain entities, especially in tech, pose systemic risk too . The fallout from this single security update shows we need to identify systemically important entities across sectors that pose risk to economic and national security. I discuss recent progress, notably from CISA, to develop a list of systemically important entities and methods from my RAND colleagues to identify the entities that are either too big, too interconnected, or too hard to substitute without posing wider systemic risk. I argue that it is time to finally adapt our thinking to the realities of our interconnected and digital world, we need interagency and international efforts to develop strategies for managing that risk. Read the full article here:

I am incredibly grateful to the Leonard D. Schaeffer Fellows in Government Service for inviting me to be the keynote speaker at their 10th anniversary Schaeffer Fellows Summit at the Cosmos Club in Washington D.C. I always relish the opportunity to interact with outstanding and highly motivated individuals as they contemplate their future careers, goals, and the path they will take to help solve the worlds most pressing problems. My talk focused on five themes for the Fellows to consider as they embark on their professional journeys, which I've included below. ⬇️ (Feel free to share with anyone who is doing the same!)   1️⃣ Don't worry about your roadmap. It’s very easy to see where you think you want to go in your career and try to sprint to it as fast as possible in a straight line. It’s fine to have a destination in mind, but if you’re overly rigid you will miss opportunities.   2️⃣ Early in your career, focus on developing skills that are transferrable. Become a good communicator. Build relationship capital. Develop bureaucratic intelligence.   3️⃣ Embrace opportunity and risk; dare to be great.   4️⃣ You have to speak your truth, but be clear-eyed about the possibility you could be wrong. You are not the only intelligent person with integrity in your organization.   5️⃣ Finally, don’t suck! This is a blinding flash of the obvious but focus on doing your job really well…not promotion or being seen. Being good at your job is what leads to advancement and opportunities.  

Does the concept of "too big to fail" apply to technology? And in light of the CrowdStrike meltdown, what can be done to address systemic risk? Watch RAND's Jonathan Welburn on CNBC.

How will the war in Ukraine end? How does *any* war end? At the same time that the U.S. and its allies continue to help Ukraine defend itself, it’s important to start to envision an endgame for the conflict, says RAND’s Samuel Charap. https://bit.ly/4c2pXqC

"Regardless of whether or not the return of conscription is a positive development for society, the fact that the draft is making a comeback should teach us an important lesson about the way we think about the future of warfare."

"Washington must be alert not only to banks but a variety of organizations whose collapse would disrupt the economy and threaten our security." RAND's Jonathan Welburn considers the recent CrowdStrike outage and lessons from the 2008 financial crisis.