Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) has been developing Agile Combat Employment to address operational challenges and ensure its ability to prosecute a contested campaign. The authors of this report demonstrate a method for PACAF to estimate potential sortie rate degradation from dispersal across bases before bases are attacked.
Authors
Mills, Patrick, Sargent, Matthew, Steiner, Colby P., Costello, Rachel
- Division
- RAND Project AIR FORCE Resource Management Program
- Pages
- 52
- Published in
- United States
- RAND Identifier
- RR-A999-3
- RAND Type
- report
- Rights
- RAND Corporation
- Series
- Research Reports
- Source
- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA999-3.html
Table of Contents
- About This Report 3
- RAND Project AIR FORCE 3
- Acknowledgments 4
- Summary 5
- Issue 5
- Approach 5
- Findings 6
- Recommendations 6
- Contents 8
- Figures and Tables 9
- Figures 9
- Tables 9
- Introduction 11
- Purpose and Scope of This Report 12
- Analytic Approach 13
- Outline of This Report 13
- Agile Combat Employment 14
- Impetus for ACE 14
- Evolution of ACE 15
- Elements of ACE 18
- Operational Concepts Alter Power Projection Features Forcing Trade-Offs 19
- Focus on One Concept Aircraft Dispersal to Multiple Bases 21
- Downsides of Base Dispersal 22
- Mitigation Options 22
- Assessing the Sortie-Generation Potential of Alternative Force Postures 24
- Costs and Risks of Dispersed Postures 24
- Sortie Analysis 25
- Sortie Modeling 26
- Dispersing More Widely Introduces Two Potential Sources of Degradation 29
- Sortie-Generation Results 30
- Conclusions and Recommendations 35
- Recommendations 35
- Details of Sortie-Generation Modeling 37
- Creating Baseline Sortie Curves 37
- Creating Feasible Sortie Schedules 37
- Design of Experiments for Sortie Analysis 39
- Sortie Schedules in Detail 40
- Abbreviations 47
- References 49
