Comparison of Proposed Air Expeditionary Force Packages Using the Thunder Campaign Simulation Program

摘要

There are currently only two force packages under consideration for Air Expeditionary Force (AEF) deployment: the Eagle package and the Falcon package. This thesis examines these and three other force packages for operational feasibility. The comparisons made between the five packages were based on five operational measures and two which describe the logistics involved with deploying each package. The operational measures and one logistics measure are obtained from the THUNDER simulation software package. The other logistics measure, amount of short-tons of cargo required to support each package, was obtained from the Logistics Plans office at HQ ACC. The principal contribution is a methodology for modeling and analyzing AEF packages using THUNDER and statistical tools. A key result (based on two notional scenarios) was that adding additional F-16 aircraft to the single MDS (all F-16) package had a negligible impact on many of the measures. Furthermore, the single MDS package recorded the most air-to-air kills and enemy ground targets destroyed. These are counterintuitive, because two of the other packages contained equal numbers of F-15Cs and F-15Es. Note that these results should be verified by using an actual theater scenario for THUNDER.