This report responds to requests by the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees to investigate the potential for civil-military integration and the implications of such integration. It is divided into six chapters and five appendices.

This report analyzes the case for developing a long-term, comprehensive strategic plan for civilian satellite remote sensing, and explores the elements of such a plan, if it were adopted. The report also enumerates many of the congressional decisions needed to ensure that future data needs will be satisfied.

This paper describes briefly the work on DoD’s Kuwait Oil Fire Health Risk Assessment to date, including the results of a pilot study of health risks, and then answers the questions addressed to OTA in PL 102-585.

This report discusses the process for developing a comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention plan. Phase I established four general goals: 1) assess risks; 2) develop prevention technologies; 3) build p revention capacities; and 4) implement prevention programs. Phase II focused on four groups at increased risk for HIV infection: women and infants; injecting drug users; youth in high-risk situations; and men who have sex with men.

This report focuses on research and technology policy issues for aviation operations: safety, security, environmental protection, and the air traffic system.

This background paper is one of four documents resulting from OTA’s study of policy issues in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.

The purpose of this report is to examine two crucial questions: 1. What are we getting out of this investment? 2. How can we improve it?

This report focuses on policy issues in three areas: 1 ) national cryptography policy, including federal information processing standards and export controls; 2) guidance on safeguarding unclassified information in federal agencies; and 3) legal issues and information security, including electronic commerce, privacy, and intellectual property.

This paper examines what is known about administrative costs in the health care systems of the United States and several other countries. In addition to exploring the types of activities that constitute health care administration, it reviews studies that measure and compare these activities in different countries, and it explores the potential usefulness of such comparisons.

This paper reviews how the United States compares with other developed countries on available health status measures, evaluates the validity of the data used to make such comparisons, and describes how international comparisons might be interpreted in the context of health care reform.

The report reviews data concerning the contribution of genetic factors to several severe mental disorders; described methodologies used in the studies, and broached several policy issues relevant to this area of research.

This report discusses globalization in perspective, U.S. technology policy in international economic perspective, and other aspects of technological developments. The most technologically sophisticated and economically significant sectors of the U.S. economy are now characterized by high levels of international production, foreign direct investment, trade among affiliated companies, and complex forms of international financial and technological collaboration.

This report examines an array of sustainable development definitions and discusses their common elements. Current agriculture, energy, and industry technologies are described as well as the strides being made in education, communication, and information technologies that could support sustainable development.

This report examines an array of sustainable development definitions and discusses their common elements.

This report is the fifth publication from OTA’S assessment on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, examines the whole range of consequences for proliferation of the Soviet Union’s breakup.

This paper describes the existing public information about osteoporosis and discusses problems that limit its usefulness, including problems in the dissemination and targeting of information to different types of people who have or are at risk of the disease. It also discusses problems that arise because of the way research findings are presented in the mass media and the widespread dissemination of information about medications that are available on the market but have not been approved by the FDA for osteoporosis.

This report examines U.S. plans for managing the prodigious quantities of data expected from current, planned, and future remote sensing satellites. In particular, it explores the Earth Observing System Data and Information System, which NASA is developing to manage and process the data from its Earth Observing System of satellites. It also analyzes the factors affecting the growth of the market for privately generated remotely sensed data.

This Background Paper summarizes OTA’s findings with regard to the three questions asked based on the workshop discussion as well as background information and discussions with various individuals before and after the workshop.

This report examines a set of environmental cost studies, compares and contrasts their methods and assumptions, and discusses how they could be made more useful to federal policy makers.

This report has four parts. The first part focuses on several factors that are necessary for substance abuse and addiction to occur, including an examination of the biological research regarding the phenomenon of addiction to a variety of substances. The second part describes individual risk and protective factors that contribute to the abuse of, and addiction to, alcohol and drugs. The third part, looks at how risk and protective factors play out in subcultures and in major activity settings (home, school, workplace, and recreation), and assesses the effectiveness of various substance abuse prevention initiatives. The fourth section, addresses a range of legislative issues and options for Congress arising from an understanding of the factors leading to substance abuse and addiction.

This paper deals with one of the most basic questions in any health research endeavor: how to measure the outcomes associated with whatever is being studied. The paper describes in greater detail some of the research techniques discussed.

This report provides point estimates of the “access gap” in ambulatory health services contacts and inpatient hospital days per person using the best available data from three recent large national surveys of the U.S. population. The report also estimates the aggregate access gap for the U.S. and it estimates the implications for national health spending of providing universal health insurance coverage.

This paper describes applications of synthetic-environment technologies in simulating combat. This background paper is the first of several publications of the OTA’S assessment of combat modeling and simulation.

This report discusses the medical malpractice system that has frequently been cited as a contributor to increasing health care costs and has been targeted in many health care reform proposals as a potential source of savings. The report first examines the nature of defensive medicine, adopting a working definition of defensive medicine that embraces the complexity of the problem from both the physician and broader public policy perspectives. Finally, it comments on the potential impact of a variety of medical malpractice reforms on the practice of defensive medicine.