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This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

iii Preface This report documents the outcome of a research project entitled "Department of Homeland Security [DHS] Evergreen Arctic Priorities," which focused on identifying priority potential Arctic capability gaps with respect to U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) operations in the region in 2017, and whether and how these gaps might become exacerbated by the 2030s. As the Arctic environment evolves, it is becoming increasingly important to determine how to operate in the region, given changing conditions and the potential for increasing activity that will drive demand for more-frequent U.S. government presence across a broader spectrum of roles. There are several challenges associated with operating in the Arctic, including large distances and the harsh environment, as well as limited infrastructure and available assets for communicating, observing, understanding, and maneuvering. This research provides an additional perspective on how to characterize potential gaps in order to develop clearer avenues ahead for mitigating them that cover a range of possible current and future USCG activities in the Arctic.The primary purpose of this research is to support a USCG Capability Analysis Report focused on the Arctic. This report could be considered similar to a capability analysis and may be of broad interest to the USCG, DHS, and other decisionmakers involved with Arctic policy and planning.

This report documents support by Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) to the U.S. Coast Guard's Evergreen strategic foresight activity. The objective was to help develop scenarios that postured Evergreen to better bridge the gap between future challenges and near-term plans, which typically focus on the urgent needs of the present. HSOAC analysts reviewed prior Evergreen activities, examined Coast Guard strategy-making and planning processes, adapted an approach for developing scenarios, and narrated a set of exemplar global planning scenarios. Although the scenario development process and resulting example scenarios focused on a Coast Guard planning context, the approach and considerations described in this report might be useful to other organizations with long-range planning needs.