The U.S. Department of Defense is considering a change in policy to allow transgender military personnel to serve openly. A RAND study examined the health care needs of transgender personnel, the costs of gender transition–related care, and the potential readiness implications of a policy change. The experiences of foreign militaries that permit transgender service members to serve openly also point to some best practices for U.S. policymakers.

In this report, the authors create a framework that can be used to rigorously consider the trade-offs involved in U.S. military intervention decisions following the outbreak of a war or crisis. This framework can provide a better understanding of the relationships between intervention timing, intervention size, and intervention outcomes to inform future debates about whether, when, and with what size force to undertake a military intervention.

No description available

No description available

This study for the U.S. Marine Corps presents a historical overview of the integration of women into the U.S. military and explores the importance of cohesion and what influences it. The gender integration experiences of foreign militaries, as well as the gender integration efforts of domestic police and fire departments, are analyzed for insights into effective policies. The potential costs of integration are analyzed as well.

This report presents a quantitative assessment of how the presentation of news has changed over the past 30 years and how it varies across platforms. Over time, and as society moved from “old” to “new” media, news content has generally shifted from more-objective event- and context-based reporting to reporting that is more subjective, relies more heavily on argumentation and advocacy, and includes more emotional appeals.

Despite Russia’s relatively small global economic footprint, it has engaged in more interventions than any other U.S. competitor since the end of the Cold War. In this report, the authors assess when, where, and why Russia conducts military interventions by analyzing the 25 interventions that Russia has undertaken since 1991, including detailed case studies of the 2008 Russia-Georgia War and Moscow’s involvement in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Political and civil discourse in the United States is characterized by “Truth Decay,” defined as increasing disagreement about facts, a blurring of the line between opinion and fact, an increase in the relative volume of opinion compared with fact, and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information. This report explores the causes and wide-ranging consequences of Truth Decay and proposes strategies for further action.