Supporting Air and Space Expeditionary Forces: A Methodology for Determining Air Force Deployment Requirements

摘要

Transforming from threat-based planning to capabilities-based planning has highlighted the need for the Air Force to be able to quantify quickly the manpower and materiel necessary to support a desired capability. From a logistical point of view, the transition accentuates the utility of having a rapid, analytical method for determining the total support required to deploy specified forces to bases across the full range of support infrastructures, including austere bases. This monograph presents such a methodology for determining manpower and equipment deployment requirements and summarizes a prototype research tool called the Strategic Tool for the Analysis of Required Transportation (START) which illustrates the methodology. (The appendix serves as a user's guide for this prototype tool.) The START program, an Excel-based spreadsheet model, determines the list of Unit Type Codes (UTCs) required to support a user-specified operation, along with the movement characteristics of the materiel for a wide range of support areas. It therefore is a demand generator of the manpower and materiel needed at a base to achieve initial operating capability, and a fully implemented tool based on this prototype should be useful for both deliberate and crisis-action planning.