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Violent nonstate actors (VNSAs) obtain money from multiple sources, both licit (e.g., donations and legitimate businesses) and illicit (e.g., extortion, smuggling, theft). They use that money to pay, equip, and sustain their fighters and to provide services to local populations, which can help build support for the groups, allowing them to extract resources, gain safe havens, and challenge state authority and territorial control. In this way, financial resources can prolong conflicts and undermine stabilization efforts after the fighting ends. Countering VNSA financing plays a critical role in degrading such organizations. Various means are available to disrupt financing. These include kinetic means, such as destroying resources or neutralizing leadership, and nonkinetic means, such as targeted financial sanctions and legal remedies. The counter–threat financing (CTF) tools that work best for transnational groups may not work as well for national ones, and some tools may prove counterproductive in certain situations. Which tools to use in a given case is not always obvious. The authors draw lessons from efforts against five VNSA groups to discover, in each case, how they financed their activities and for what purposes, as well as which methods to counter this financing worked best and which were counterproductive. The authors then consider what the U.S. Army can do to support counter–terrorism financing efforts.

Terrorism --- Non-state actors (International relations) --- Finance.

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The territorial defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) left millions of Iraqi and Syrian civilians displaced, along with the families of Syrian, Iraqi, and foreign ISIS fighters. A significant share of the families of ISIS fighters resides in two internally displaced person camps located in northeastern Syria, al-Hol and Roj, intermingled with Syrian and Iraqi civilians. There are open questions about the futures of the residents of these camps and the implications of housing innocent, displaced residents alongside or adjacent to the families of ISIS fighters. One of the most significant challenges of this arrangement is the need to limit the spread of extremist ideology and ISIS recruitment among the children of ISIS fighters' families and other civilians. In this report, the authors examine the humanitarian and security conditions in these camps, address the potential impact on ISIS recruitment, and highlight critical challenges in the need to return these displaced residents to their home communities and countries. They also offer recommendations to improve living conditions in al-Hol and Roj, address the legal and judicial conundrums facing foreigners living in the camps, and mitigate the threat of radicalization from the residents within the camps.

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The National Defense Strategy (NDS) emphasizes the need for U.S. forces to be interoperable with capable allies and partners. To support the NDS, the U.S. Army develops and executes doctrine and guidelines for how its units can achieve interoperability with partners. The Army identified a need to develop an overarching concept for interoperability that includes explicit links between current Army multinational interoperability doctrine and mission command doctrine. Concurrently, it wanted an enduring and standardized way to measure levels of interoperability achieved as a result of major training events. To that end, the Army asked RAND Arroyo Center to conduct an analysis of alternatives (AoA) of interoperability measurement systems. Researchers looked at eight different approaches, gathering and analyzing data from a review of materials provided by representatives for each approach and information from multiple rounds of interviews with representatives. No single approach addressed all dimensions identified as important for a future system, so a completely new approach was proposed, drawing on strengths and eliminating weaknesses from other approaches analyzed. The Army decided to develop a new system — the Army Interoperability Measurement System (AIMS), which includes a quantitative instrument for measuring interoperability levels, a qualitative component to enable capability gap analysis, an automated approach to connect and analyze the data, and exploitation panels that convene immediately following a training exercise. The authors document their AoA, present the supporting evidence for their measurement system recommendations, and details the early development of AIMS.

Combined operations (Military science) --- Evaluation.

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This report synthesizes the findings and recommendations from two companion reports on intrastate proxy wars: civil wars in which at least one local warring party receives material support from an external state. One of these companion reports examines motives and trends for great powers' use of proxy warfare in intrastate conflict, while the other examines the military implications of these wars. The authors conducted the research for these reports using a quantitative analysis of proxy wars since 1946, case studies on major powers that have sponsored surrogates in such conflicts, and case studies on the military implications of such conflicts. Looking forward, there are worrying indications that geopolitical factors may be driving countries, including Russia and Iran, to more frequent use of proxy warfare, and China might return to such forms of competition under certain circumstances. Ideology seems less likely to fuel proxy wars than it did during the Cold War, however, and China has a number of economic incentives to avoid such practices. The prospect of the increasing use of proxy warfare has a number of implications for U.S. defense policy. Violent nonstate actors supported by states tend to be much more lethal than those without state support. These enhanced capabilities appear to make them much more threatening to U.S. allies and partners, potentially forcing the United States to intervene on their behalf to protect them.

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The authors used both quantitative analysis and case studies of China, Iran, and Russia to examine the causes and likely future trends in proxy wars: civil wars in which at least one local warring party receives material support from an external state. The purpose of the project was to provide insight into the determinants of state support for violent nonstate actors, assess the risks that third-party support poses to U.S. overseas contingency operations, and analyze policy options available to the United States to counter such foreign support. With the renewed focus in many regions on strategic competition, there seems to be a growing risk that states will feel increasingly threatened by their rivals and take greater steps to counteract these threats in the years to come. The case studies highlight how such an environment can often, though not always, lead to an increased interest in supporting proxy warfare. Of even greater concern is the fact that geopolitical drivers of proxy warfare can often be self-reinforcing. The states considered in the case studies were usually able to develop at least a rudimentary capability for proxy warfare very quickly, within a couple of years, often building on the capabilities of prior efforts or regimes. Beyond this baseline capability, however, a relatively lengthy period of learning and growth to better develop proxy warfare capabilities appears to be common.