John G. Drew

A high-end fight places heavy demands on U.S. Air Force command and control of combat support. Policy has increasingly emphasized the need for new concepts, such as dynamic force employment, which stresses the need to maneuver and function in a communications degraded environment. The authors propose robust and resilient concepts for the command and control of logistics in such a situation.

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.

The authors set out to identify ways to enable the airfield operations (AO) career fields to respond to the needs created by the Dynamic Force Employment concept and the USAF implementation of Agile Combat Employment by reviewing USAF and joint documents for background, interviewing experts to learn current challenges and the potential impact of new demands, and developing tools to analyze the ability of AO personnel to meet those demands.

Researchers present a Future Logistics Concept Assessment Framework, which is a disciplined, systematic way to assess proposed future logistics concepts to meet the requirements of the National Defense Strategy. The idea is to reveal the most-promising concepts and prune the least promising before significant resources are invested. The goal is not to predict the future, but to show how a concept would fare across various potential futures.

The U.S. Air Force asked RAND Project AIR FORCE to determine where it is most fruitful to focus effort in making changes to tactics, techniques, and procedures to improve an airman's ability to detect, evaluate, and mitigate significant corruption of logistics data. The goal is to respond to errors in data before they have a significant negative effect on combat operations.

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 explores the relationship between Air Force infrastructure management and mission capability and risk. The goal is to identify methodological approaches and data requirements for quantifying and articulating these links and enabling the Air Force to answer the question: What is the effect of funding infrastructure below stated requirements?

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.

This technical report describes the benefits of reallocating certain maintenance activities between mission-generation locations and a repair network, options to support the C-130, and consolidating repair network activities to centralized repair facilities. The report also provides an initial assessment of maintenance concepts that integrate wing-level and depot-level maintenance processes.

Since 2004, the U.S. Air Force has provided personnel for joint sourcing solution assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, certain Air Force career fields are experiencing greater-than-expected deployment strains. Air Force personnel and deployment data were used to populate a RAND-developed model to assess the supply of and demand for Air Force personnel and various types of capabilities to fill joint assignments.

Analyses demonstrate how F-16 and KC-135 aircraft maintenance units can be reconfigured to support mission generation operations, with heavy maintenance such as aircraft phase inspections reassigned to a network of centralized repair facilities. This approach identifies options that either exceed current maintenance capabilities at current cost levels or meet required capability levels at reduced cost.

This study examines contingency purchases made in theater to support U.S. Air Force activities during Operation Iraqi Freedom in fiscal years 2003 and 2004. It develops a custom database to determine the types of goods and services purchased and illustrates how such data can be used to facilitate planning and policy decisions associated with future CCO staffing and training, combat support, and sharing of lessons within the theater.

This book describes a potential common operating system (COP) for the Air Force material sustainment system (MSS). The authors first develop a COP based on the principles of effects-based measures, schwerpunkt (organizational focus), decision rights, and a nonmarket economic framework, then they apply the COP to depot-level reparable component sustainment to illustrate how the COP would improve overall MSS efficiency and responsiveness.This book describes a common operating picture for the Air Force materiel sustainment system that, if implemented, would make the system more efficient and more responsive to changing operational needs.

This monograph details an analysis of the use of Centralized Intermediate Repair Facilities (CIRFs) to provide off-equipment component repair for CONUS-based fighter aircraft, supporting both training and deployment scenarios. It presents an analytic method for CIRF network design that generates a range of cost-effective alternatives. It identifies CIRF alternatives that achieve increased efficiency without reducing combat support capability.It evaluates CONUS use of Centralized Intermediate Repair Facilities for off-equipment repair of aircraft components and presents analytic network design method developed for the identification of cost-efficient alternatives for such networks.

RAND developed a methodology to help understand and explain the differences between U.S. Air National Guard and active component aircraft maintenance productivity. This research focuses on maintenance options for supporting associate units, where the goal of the associate unit is to produce trained pilots in the most efficient manner possible. It evaluates maintenance options for U.S. Air Force associate units, where the goal of the associate units is to produce trained pilots in the most efficient manner possible.