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Many state and local officials are making social-distancing policy decisions based on the actions of other locations rather than through a decisionmaking framework that evaluates these measures and their reduction of the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This report provides an initial assessment of the possible short-term economy-wide effects of social distancing. These results should be taken as rough order-of-magnitude estimates meant to help inform decisionmakers during the COVID-19 crisis.

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Information and information technologies infuse all parts of modern society - in peacetime, during periods of strategic competition, and during wartime. Since the early 2000s, advanced information technologies for rapidly sharing, processing, and analyzing data have had a significant effect on the character of Russian military operations. An examination of the Russian military-scientific literature reveals the centrality of the concept of information confrontation in Russian military strategy. Information confrontation, or informatsionnoe protivoborstvo (IPb), is a distinct element of Russian strategic thinking in the post-Cold War era. Russia sees itself as being in a constant state of information confrontation with the West as it tries to expand its own dominance and prevent its adversaries from gaining influence. In this report, the authors examine prevailing definitions and types of information confrontation, and they discuss the historical evolution of Russian (and Soviet) influence operations and psychological warfare, from 18th-century Imperial Russia up to the Vladimir Putin era. As a fundamental element of Russian strategy, information confrontation is evolving from something primarily carried out to supplement traditional means of waging war into something that is carried out continuously and in peacetime to shape the operational environment so that it will be malleable in future conflicts. The authors also analyze the experience of Ukraine, which has been the subject of one of Russia's most comprehensive IPb and hybrid warfare campaigns in recent years. Ukraine offers a window into the present-day role of IPb and Russian activities and intentions in the information domain.

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Increased reliance on intelligence processing, exploitation, and dissemination; networked real-time communications for command and control; and a proliferation of electronic controls and sensors in military vehicles (such as remotely piloted aircraft), equipment, and facilities have greatly increased the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)'s dependence on energy, particularly electric power, at installations. Thus, ensuring that forces and facilities have access to a reliable supply of electricity is critical for mission assurance. However, most of the electricity consumed by military installations in the continental United States comes from the commercial grid—a system that is largely outside of DoD control and increasingly vulnerable to both natural hazards and deliberate attacks, including cyberattacks. In this report, researchers explore two approaches that DoD might consider as options for deterring attacks against the power grid: enhancing resilience and reliability to deter by denial and using the threat of retaliation to deter by cost imposition. The report represents a first step in developing frameworks and context to support DoD decisionmaking in this area.

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In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, significant attention was paid to systemic risk within heavily interconnected financial networks. The academic discussions on interbank network structure, market stability, and contagion gave rise to a policy debate about whether major banks had become both too big and too interconnected to fail. However, despite the focus on systemic risk—the risk of market collapse resulting from firm-level risks—within the financial sector, little attention was paid to systemic risks in the economy at large. The authors of this report address that gap in research. To begin to measure the potential magnitude of systemic risk in the broad economy, the authors estimated firm-to-firm connections across sectors of the U.S. economy. Using network analysis on observed firm-level networks to elucidate heavily interconnected firms and areas of centrality (i.e., firms of significant network importance), statistical inference, and network calibration, the authors provide a new approach to modeling the economy at the firm level that expands on the traditional sector-level input-output modeling by estimating firm-level input-output flows. The result allows one to use traditional input-output modeling to estimate the size of potential idiosyncratic shocks and to use economically weighted measures of centrality to reveal systemically important firms. The approach is a contribution to the growing literature on the microfoundations of economic risk, with the potential for use across a wide range of applications from financial stability to natural disasters.

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In many potential operating environments, the U.S. Air Force faces adversaries that are increasingly capable of limiting where and how it projects combat power. Whether the environments are called anti-access/area denial environments or contested, degraded, and operationally limited (CDO) environments, they feature adversaries with larger numbers of more-precise missiles that have further reach than before and that threaten traditional U.S. air bases like never before. To persevere in CDO environments, the Air Force and regional warfighting commanders are exploring a variety of alternative force deployment and employment concepts under an umbrella initiative called adaptive basing (AB). Upon surveying the variety of concepts categorized as part of AB, the authors found that all of them—adaptive or not—can be characterized as survival strategies. Thus, AB is less about increasing the adaptiveness of aircraft and air forces than it is about extending their survivability through strategies that are both traditional and adaptive. In this report, RAND researchers review the motivations for AB, describe a footprint model used for estimating the AB implications for Agile Combat Support (ACS), estimate the ACS requirements to perform three fundamental competencies that can enable AB concepts, consider the obstacles to supporting those requirements, and discuss the implications and recommendations for the ACS community and the Air Force at large. Ultimately, it will take a more-concerted, deliberate, and organized effort to flesh out and refine AB concepts into useable warfighting tools. Some concepts might be discarded for reasons of feasibility, cost, or effectiveness, but if the threats perceived today are credible, AB ought to be tested and found wanting rather than declared to be too difficult without sufficient investigation.