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.

The geopolitical divide that once defined the U.S. military policy collapsed as the Soviet Union disintegrated and was replaced by the rise of regional hegemons, producing an evolving security environment that is driven not only by regional powers but also by a persistent global insurgency and counterinsurgency. 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. The Air Force, like the other services, has responded by transforming itself into a more expeditionary force. For the Air Force 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 focuses on an analytic framework for evaluating options for overseas combat support basing (or forward support locations). The presentation of this framework is important because it addresses how to assess these options in terms of the relevant programming costs while considering a novel approach to scenario planning. This formulation minimizes the costs of operating and constructing facilities and transporting war reserve materiel (WRM), costs that are associated with meeting the training and deterrent exercises needed to demonstrate U.S. global power projection capability and thereby deter aggression, while maintaining the necessary storage capacity and system throughput to engage in major combat operations should deterrence fail. This framework is based on the notion that U.S. interests are not only global but dynamic as well, particularly when the United States is confronted with emerging anti-access and area denial threats.

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.

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.