Daniel M. Romano

The U.S. Air Force has a goal of reducing the life cycle operating and support (O&S) costs of the F-35A. Maintenance manpower is a significant driver of O&S costs, and consolidation and reorganization of career fields could reduce manpower and training costs. The authors of this report evaluate the costs and benefits of six F-35A maintenance manpower force structures in the U.S. Air Force that merge maintenance career fields in different ways.

Authors present a framework for evaluating combat support requirements, basing posture vulnerabilities, operational resilience, and mitigation strategies to support combat operations in a denied environment. Analysts can assess combat support design vulnerabilities against attacks by near-peer or regional powers and the costs, effectiveness, and risks of alternative strategies to mitigate potential adversary anti-access/area-denial capabilities.

A congressionally mandated review of the proposed restructuring of Air Force Materiel Command examined the proposal and its effect on life-cycle management, weapon system sustainment, and overall support to the warfighter. It also presents process improvement options to improve warfighter support and product development/support system design and operations support efficiencies, and it suggests organizational changes to facilitate their implementation.

This report provides select results from a RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF) project titled Reducing Operating and Support Costs for the Mobility Air Forces sponsored by AMC/A5/8 and AMC/A4. This report examines the cost and readiness implications of consolidating maintenance occupational specialties for new and legacy mobility fleets. Implications are derived from an assessment conducted for the KC-135 fleet.

Using the architecture developed as a companion piece to this analysis, this report identifies and describes where shortfalls exist between current agile combat support (ACS) processes and the vision for integrating enhanced ACS processes into Air Force command and control (C2). It evaluates C2 nodes at each echelon of responsibility and across operational phases and suggests mitigation strategies needed to facilitate an efficient and effective global C2 network.

This report proposes new metrics to measure expeditionary agile combat support (ACS) capacity and uses these metrics to assess the capacity of the current ACS manpower mix to support expeditionary operations, finding that there are imbalances among its career fields relative to expeditionary demands. This report develops and assesses several rebalanced manpower mixes to address these imbalances.