Review of the Army's Technical Guides on Assessing and Managing Chemical Hazards to Deployed Personnel

Review of the Army's Technical Guides on Assessing and Managing Chemical Hazards to Deployed Personnel
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2004-08-03
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0309166179

To guide mission planning, military decision makers need information on the health risks of potential exposures to individual soldiers and their potential impact on mission operations. To help with the assessment of chemical hazards, the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine developed three technical guides for characterizing chemicals in terms of their risks to the mission and to the health of the force. The report reviews these guides for their scientific validity and conformance with current risk-assessment practices. The report finds that the military exposure guidelines are appropriate (with some modification) for providing force health protection, but that for assessing mission risk, a new set of exposure guidelines is needed that predict concentrations at which health effects would degrade the performance of enough soldiers to hinder mission accomplishment.

Strengthening Data Science Methods for Department of Defense Personnel and Readiness Missions

Strengthening Data Science Methods for Department of Defense Personnel and Readiness Missions
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2017-02-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0309450810

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Personnel & Readiness), referred to throughout this report as P&R, is responsible for the total force management of all Department of Defense (DoD) components including the recruitment, readiness, and retention of personnel. Its work and policies are supported by a number of organizations both within DoD, including the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), and externally, including the federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) that work for DoD. P&R must be able to answer questions for the Secretary of Defense such as how to recruit people with an aptitude for and interest in various specialties and along particular career tracks and how to assess on an ongoing basis service members' career satisfaction and their ability to meet new challenges. P&R must also address larger-scale questions, such as how the current realignment of forces to the Asia-Pacific area and other regions will affect recruitment, readiness, and retention. While DoD makes use of large-scale data and mathematical analysis in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and elsewhereâ€"exploiting techniques such as complex network analysis, machine learning, streaming social media analysis, and anomaly detectionâ€"these skills and capabilities have not been applied as well to the personnel and readiness enterprise. Strengthening Data Science Methods for Department of Defense Personnel and Readiness Missions offers and roadmap and implementation plan for the integration of data analysis in support of decisions within the purview of P&R.

Improving Oversight and Coordination of Department of Defense Programs That Address Problematic Behaviors Among Military Personnel

Improving Oversight and Coordination of Department of Defense Programs That Address Problematic Behaviors Among Military Personnel
Author: Jefferson P. Marquis
Publisher: RAND Corporation
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780833095688

"Pressures inside and outside the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to reduce the incidence of problematic behaviors within the military are inducing the Office of the Secretary of Defense to rethink how it is organized to oversee and coordinate DoD's varied behavior-mitigation efforts. This report provides the results of a RAND study that examined the integration of programs for addressing a specified set of problematic behaviors: sexual harassment, sexual assault, unlawful discrimination, substance abuse, suicide, and hazing. The report combines the results of the two major lines of research: the first related to the development of a typology of common problematic behavior risk and protective factors and prevention methods based on a review of the behavioral science literature, and the second related to the organization, coordination, oversight, and managerial practices of programs to address problematic behavior based on document analysis and policy discussions with DoD and service headquarters officials. Following a discussion of findings from the two lines of research, the report lays out a series of recommendations for the Office of the Secretary of Defense to improve its understanding of the interrelationships among problematic behaviors and its oversight and coordination of programs to address those behaviors"--Publisher's description.