Human Rights and the War on Terror: Afghanistan

After September 11, Afghanistan became the first battleground of the War on Terror when the Taliban government refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda members. Human rights concerns about these events fall in two areas. First, did the United States violate human rights when it launched Operation Enduring Freedom to overthrow the Taliban and during the subsequent occupation? Second, have the occupation forces and new regime of under the leadership of Hamid Karzai done enough to improve the previously miserable human rights situation in Afghanistan

Defense Acquisition Trends 2022

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Defense Acquisition Trends 2022: A Preliminary Look

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Acquisition Research SymposiumThis report is the latest in an annual series examining trends in what the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is buying, how the DoD is buying it, and from whom the DoD is buying. Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 proved to be the end of a five-year bounce back in defense contract spending, with contract obligations dropping to $380.1 billion, a 10% decline from FY2020 but still 28% higher than the FY2015 trough. This year’s study focuses on the first year to partially fall under the new administration and examines how present trends align with the newly released National Defense Strategy fact sheet (DoD, 2022). The new administration has maintained a concern with speeding force development and technological adaption that justifies a continued focus on research and development in both contracting and other transaction authority (OTA) agreements. Additionally, this report includes analysis of the topline DoD contracting trends with particular attention to the report on the State of Competition within the Defense Industrial Base.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Trends in Department of Defense Other Transaction Authority (OTA) Usage

Acquisition Research Program Sponsored Report SeriesSponsored Acquisition Research & Technical ReportsThe federal government’s use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreements has exploded in recent years, thanks in large part due to a surge in popularity within the Department of Defense (DoD). Neither a contract, grant, or cooperative agreements, OTAs are an acquisition approach that enable certain federal agencies to access goods and services outside of the traditional acquisition system. This research examines the trends in OTA usage across DoD to provide insights into what DoD is using OTAs for, how they are spending under an OTA, and to whom the majority OTA obligations go.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Assessing the Reliability of the Future Years Defense Program and Building a Forecast

Discerning, negotiating, and communicating priorities are necessary tasks for the U.S. defense acquisition system to effectively implement its portion of the National Defense Strategy. One of the Department of Defense's central tools for doing so is the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP), a projection of the cost and composition of the force over the next 5 years. This project created a dataset and employs it to study FYDP reliability, focusing on two sources of uncertainty: differences in approach between military departments and differences in volatility between those line items in the base budget and those that include contingency operation spending.Prepared for the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943.Naval Postgraduate SchoolApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Business Models for Innovation in a MOSA Environment

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Open for Business: Business Models for Innovation with Modular Open Systems Approaches

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Acquisition Research SymposiumModular Open Systems Approaches (MOSA) build on techniques used in the commercial world to attempt to bring innovation, speed, and savings to Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition. However, while competition can be a powerful motivator, MOSA can be disruptive to those traditional defense industrial base business models that rely on the expectation of long-term production and sustainment revenue to make back corporate investments. This project undertook interviews and surveys to better understand how MOSA influences vendor incentives and what business models may best serve DoD needs going forward. MOSA’s promise of enabling faster technology refresh and bringing in new sources of innovation addresses technical and operational challenges associated with 21st century great power competition and longstanding DoD difficulties in accessing commercial technology. This project has identified three overarching challenges regarding MOSA adoption: communicating and demonstrating government commitment; developing a MOSA-enabled IP and data rights strategy; and establishing standards and interfaces. In addressing these three challenges, the government will need to employ its acquisition toolkit to take different approaches with different vendors. To better understand how to make this transition a success, this paper presents a framework for evaluating the DoD’s readiness for MOSA.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Tooth loss and obstructive sleep apnea signs and symptoms in the US population

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between tooth loss and signs and symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in a representative sample of the general US population

TRECVID 2014 -- An Overview of the Goals, Tasks, Data, Evaluation Mechanisms and Metrics

International audienceThe TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2014 was a TREC-style video analysis and retrieval evaluation, the goal of which remains to promote progress in content-based exploitation of digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over the last dozen years this effort has yielded a better under- standing of how systems can effectively accomplish such processing and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. TRECVID is funded by the NIST with support from other US government agencies. Many organizations and individuals worldwide contribute significant time and effort

Optimizing sequencing protocols for leaderboard metagenomics by combining long and short reads.

As metagenomic studies move to increasing numbers of samples, communities like the human gut may benefit more from the assembly of abundant microbes in many samples, rather than the exhaustive assembly of fewer samples. We term this approach leaderboard metagenome sequencing. To explore protocol optimization for leaderboard metagenomics in real samples, we introduce a benchmark of library prep and sequencing using internal references generated by synthetic long-read technology, allowing us to evaluate high-throughput library preparation methods against gold-standard reference genomes derived from the samples themselves. We introduce a low-cost protocol for high-throughput library preparation and sequencing