Advanced Research and Assessment Group

The Advanced Research and Assessment Group (ARAG) was a department of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom concerned with long-term planning and threat assessment.

ARAG was established in 2005 by Chris Donnelly CMG, the former principal advisor to the NATO Secretary General. He realised that across the UK Ministry of Defence and wider government no organisation was either adaptable or innovative enough to research 21st Century security challenges. ARAG brought together experts from the military, academia and other fields in "research clusters" dedicated to specific areas of concern, in order to provide policy-makers with focussed analysis of international security issues. ARAG members were hand-picked and came from a wide background of skills, experience and nationalities. ARAG subsumed the Conflict Studies Research Centre, previously known as the Soviet Studies Research Centre, which for nearly 40 years had studied the Soviet Union, working in open source organic languages to supplement MoD and Intelligence Service assets. ARAG worked across government departments undertaking both directed and undirected research and broadening its reach to encompass new security challenges such as China, cyber security and strategic communication. It produced a large number of research papers - made freely available to the public from the Defence Academy website - as well as more targeted limited distribution work. Many of these papers became seminal reference works including Russia and The West: A Reassessment by Dr James Sherr, Charles Blandy's correct prediction of the Russian attack on Georgia, Professor James Pettifer's analysis of the Greek financial crisis and the joint paper by Major General Andrew Mackay and Commander Steve Tatham. Mackay is on public record as stating that ARAG was the only organisation in the MoD capable of helping him plan and write his operational design for his Brigade tour in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2007. ARAG also administered the Defence Academy Reserve Cadre, a network of over 70 Reserve Forces personnel with unusual civilian skills sets or languages. The Cadre personnel were designed to augment regular forces and other government departments in providing specialist civilian skills in operational areas. They were also, at one point, the only part of the UK Defence Community directly assisting the UK Prevent agenda through their mentoring at the Active Change Foundation. The cadre was described by then Vice Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Timothy Granville-Chapman as a 'work of genius'.

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