To meet the Air Force's goals of global strike and persistent dominance, it is vital that the support for the warfighter be efficient in all aspects of deployment, employment, and redeployment. In order for rapid deployments to succeed, the Air Force must determine where combat support assets should be forward positioned. Previously, much of the focus has been on allocating resources to different regions of the world; now the focus is on finding a more efficient and effective global allocation that is not regionally constrained. The objective of this dissertation is to identify a robust set of facility locations for the Air Force to place combat support basing materiel that will cover a broad range of potential missions (e.g., training, humanitarian, and major combat operations) that may occur around the world. These decisions are modeled using mixed integer programming models. Because the Air Force faces risks associated with the loss of access to such storage sites, this dissertation addresses the ability of the network to perform well even when parts of it fail, a concept referred to as reliability. These models are used to identify the additional costs necessary to build varying levels of reliability into the solutions. These solutions will take into account risk and uncertainties, while meeting time constraints associated with the delivery of materiel.

The ability of U.S. forces to provide swift and tailored responses to a multitude of threats across the globe is a crucial component of security in today's complex political environment. To realize its goals of global strike and persistent dominance, it is vital that the Air Force support the warfighter seamlessly and efficiently in all phases of deployment, employment, and redeployment. One of the major pillars for achieving these objectives is a global combat support basing architecture. This report presents an analytic framework and model for evaluating options for overseas combat support basing. The authors develop several sets of deployment scenarios to measure the effect of timing, location, and intensity of operational requirements on combat support and to account for the inherent uncertainties in future planning. They apply political, geographical, and vulnerability constraints to the model and present a feasible set of candidate locations for consideration by the Air Force.

U.S. Air Force (USAF) global posture—its overseas forces, facilities, and arrangements with partner nations—faces a variety of fiscal, political, and military challenges. This report seeks to identify why the USAF needs a global posture, where it needs basing and access, the types of security partnerships that minimize peacetime access risk, and the amount of forward presence that the USAF requires.

This independent assessment is a comprehensive study of the strategic benefits, risks, and costs of U.S. military presence overseas. The report provides policymakers a way to evaluate the range of strategic benefits and costs that follow from revising the U.S. overseas military presence by characterizing how this presence contributes to assurance, deterrence, responsiveness, and security cooperation goals.

This report documents the history of the interactions between RAND Corporation logistics researchers and Air Force leaders over more than 40 years to inform decisions involving logistics planning, programming, and budgeting and to develop, maintain, and evolve an approach for improving the Air Force logistics system.

An analytical framework and methodology for capability-area reviews is described, along with new tools to support capabilities analysis and strategic-level defense planning in the Defense Department and the Services. BCOT generates and screens preliminary options, and the Portfolio-Analysis Tool (PAT) is used to evaluate options that pass screening. The concepts are illustrated with applications to Global Strike and Ballistic Missile Defense. Recommendations are made for further defense-planning research.

CMH Publication 70-30. Edited by Frank N. Schubert and TheresaL. Kraus. Discusses the United States Army's role in the Persian Gulf War from August 1990 to February 1991. Shows the various strands that came together to produce the army of the 1990s and how that army in turn performed under fire and in the glare of world attention. Retains a sense of immediacy in its approach. Contains maps which were carefully researched and compiled as original documents in their own right. Includes an index.