The U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD's) Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) System was originally developed in the 1960s as a structured approach for planning long-term resource development, assessing program cost-effectiveness, and aligning resources to strategies. Yet changes to the strategic environment, the industrial base, and the nature of military capabilities have raised the question of whether existing U.S. defense budgeting processes remain well aligned with national security needs. Congress called for the establishment of the Commission on PPBE Reform. As part of its data collection efforts, the commission asked RAND Corporation researchers to conduct case studies of budgeting processes across nine comparative organizations: five international defense organizations and four U.S. federal government agencies. Congress also specifically requested two case studies of near-peer competitors, and the research team selected the other seven cases in close partnership with the commission. In this volume, the first of four, RAND researchers conduct case studies of the budgeting processes of China and Russia, the two near-peer competitors. Researchers conducted extensive document reviews and structured discussions with subject-matter experts with experience in the defense budgeting processes of the international governments and other U.S. federal government agencies. Each case study was assigned a unique team with appropriate regional or organizational expertise. For the near-peer competitor cases, the assigned experts had the language skills and methodological training to facilitate working with primary sources in Chinese or Russian. The analysis was also supplemented by experts in the U.S. PPBE process.

The United States is in the midst of a shift in strategic focus from countering terrorism to countering China and Russia in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. Africa, a location for great-power competition during the Cold War, is yet again summoning more interest from the United States' great-power competitors — China and Russia. This report — part of a four-volume series — explores where and how the United States, China, and Russia are competing for influence in Africa; what kinds of interests they have in the continent; what kinds of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic influence-seeking measures they are using; where and why competition might turn into conflict; what form that conflict might take; and what implications the findings have for the U.S. government at large, the joint force, and the Department of the Air Force in particular. This research was completed in September 2021, just after the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan and before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report has not been subsequently revised.