James A Leftwich

The authors examine how to craft, assess, and implement an organizational design in the U.S. Air Force to design a force that is effective at deterring and fighting a peer adversary and fund and field that force in a time frame that meets warfighting needs.

The Air Force has long faced a challenge integrating force design and capability development planning with programming. RAND Project Air Force assisted the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC) in conceptualizing analytical and other products to support concept development, force design options, and capability development planning. The authors present findings and recommendations for AFWIC's analytical processes and products.

For the purposes of capability development planning, RAND Project AIR FORCE focuses on analytical methods that can be used for decisionmaking under conditions of deep uncertainty about the future threat environment, rate of technological advancement, and budgeting. Such methods can also inform investment trades across warfighting domains and functional areas, as well as other responsibilities of the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability.

As Pacific Air Forces pursues evolving operational concepts of employment designed to improve operational resiliency, questions about the fragility of the combat support (CS) enterprise persist. This report presents a framework to assess necessary elements of the CS enterprise--including base, theater, and global resources--for operating in a hybrid push-pull system as a means to mitigate uncertainty and adversary actions.

The Air Force lacks a comprehensive tool or methodology for integrated deployment planning that can rapidly explore trade-offs among capability (or risk), speed, and cost to achieve lean force packages for use in contested, degraded, and operationally limited environments. This report describes a methodology and prototype tool--called the Lean Strategic Tool for the Analysis of Required Transportation (Lean-START)--that fills the void.

This report provides a strategic view of the analytical capabilities that are needed by the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center (AFIMSC) to allocate resources to and assess the performance of installation and mission support activities. AFIMSC needs a coherent, rational, and transparent method to allocate resources across missions and installations.

This report presents a construct for reorganizing Air Force acquisition and purchasing activities by implementing purchasing and supply management. This report presents a construct for reorganizing Air Force acquisition and purchasing activities using purchasing and supply management (PSM). PSM involves managing not only suppliers but the entire supply network. A PSM demonst ration was chartered and eight initiatives were targeted to help modernize the spares process and ultimately put more spares into the hands of maintainers. The report presents a flexible, springboard design to guide implementation of the process.