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Agile Combat Employment C O R P O R A T I O N PATRICK MILLS, JAMES A. LEFTWICH, JOHN G. DREW, DANIEL P. FELTEN, JOSH GIRARDINI, JOHN P. GODGES, MICHAEL J. LOSTUMBO, ANU NARAYANAN, KRISTIN VAN ABEL, JONATHAN WILLIAM WELBURN, ANNA JEAN WIRTH Building Agile Combat Support Competencies to Enable Evolving Adaptive Basing Concepts rr-4200_cover_8.5x11_v1.indd All Pages 3/27/20 8:27 AM For more information on this publication, visit www.rand.org/t/RR4200 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this publication. ISBN: 978-1-9774-0425-1 Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2020 RAND Corporation R® is a registered trademark. Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org Preface For several years, the U.S. Air Force has been grappling with how to survive and fight in contested, degraded, and operationally limited (CDO) environments, and one of its recent innovations has been the advancement of basing concepts that require significant resilience and mobility of combat forces. Headquarters Air Force (HAF) has sought to bring some of these survivability-focused concepts under one umbrella, which was originally called adaptive basing.1 As the operational community pursues these concepts, it raises difficult questions as to how the Agile Combat Support (ACS) community would support such concepts. Adaptive basing is not yet the official policy of the Air Force, and it is not the only concept under development for operating in CDO environments. Therefore, the Air Force does not have a clearly defined set of operational requirements from which to develop ACS requirements for capabilities, resources, and training. Nonetheless, the ACS community seeks to understand what it might be called on to provide the operational forces to enable the kind of adaptiveness and agility currently being contemplated. In this report, we review the motivations for adaptive basing, estimate its requirements for ACS, consider the obstacles to fulfilling those requirements, and discuss the implications and recommendations for the ACS community and the Air Force as a whole. We define adaptive basing and provide a framework for thinking about how it operates. In this report, we take a building-block approach, distilling operational concepts and translating them into what they require of ACS forces. We also provide a view of the potential obstacles to executing adaptive basing concepts and discuss the need for additional analyses to flesh out the pursuit and value determination of such concepts. Our recommendations address (1) how to modify ACS to pursue adaptive basing and (2) how to assess its value. This report supersedes an earlier report that was written as part of this research project, titled Building ACS Competencies to Enable Evolving Adaptive Basing Concepts (Mills et al., 2019, Not available to the general public). The research reported here was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force and conducted within the Resource Management Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE as part of a fiscal year 2017 project titled “Agile Combat Support (ACS) for Adaptive Basing.” The work was sponsored by the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, Engineering and Force Protection (A4), and should be of interest to operations and Air Force combatant commanders, planners, and logisticians. 1 At the time this research was conducted, HAF’s concept was called adaptive basing. At the time this report was being published in its final form, however, the Air Force was seeking to unify and standardize its terminology and it generally converged on agile combat employment. In this report, we use adaptive basing to encompass the variety of operating and basing concepts that require adaptiveness, responsiveness, and agility to survive and operate in CDO environments. iii RAND Project AIR FORCE RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF), a division of the RAND Corporation, is the U.S. Air Force’s federally funded research and development center for studies and analyses. PAF provides the Air Force with independent analyses of policy alternatives affecting the development, employment, combat readiness, and support of current and future air, space, and cyber forces. Research is conducted in four programs: Strategy and Doctrine; Force Modernization and Employment; Manpower, Personnel, and Training; and Resource Management. The research reported here was prepared under contract FA7014-16-D-1000. Additional information about PAF is available on our website: http://www.rand.org/paf/ This report documents work originally shared with the U.S. Air Force on September 6, 2017. The draft report, issued on September 30, 2017, was reviewed by formal peer reviewers and U.S. Air Force subject-matter experts. iv Contents Preface ............................................................................................................................................ iii Figures........................................................................................................................................... vii Tables ........................................................................................................................................... viii Summary ........................................................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... xviii Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................... xix 1. Introduction: The Challenges of Adaptive Basing ...................................................................... 1 A Survival Strategy .................................................................................................................................. 1 What Is Adaptive Basing? ........................................................................................................................ 2 Historical Context: From Expeditionary to Adaptive ............................................................................... 6 Two Broad Challenges ............................................................................................................................. 8 Goals of This Report ................................................................................................................................. 8 Organization of This Report ..................................................................................................................... 9 2. Adaptive Basing and Its Enabling Agile Combat Support Competencies ................................ 10 Cross-Cutting Agile Combat Support Competencies of Core Adaptive Basing Concepts .................... 10 Next Steps ............................................................................................................................................... 14 3. Estimating the Resource Requirements for Agile Combat Support Competencies .................. 15 Footprint Model: Lean-START .............................................................................................................. 15 4. Resource Requirements for Integrated Basing ......................................................................... 20 Traditional Basing Approaches .............................................................................................................. 20 How Integrated Basing Would Differ from Traditional Approaches ..................................................... 21 How Integrated Basing Would Support Adaptive Basing ...................................................................... 25 How Agile Combat Support Could Support Integrated Basing ............................................................. 25 Integrated Basing in the Context of Base Archetypes ............................................................................ 29 Obstacles to Fulfilling the Resource Requirements for Integrated Basing ............................................ 37 Next Steps ............................................................................................................................................... 39 5. Resource Requirements for Flexible Operations ...................................................................... 40 Traditional Aviation Operations and Maintenance ................................................................................ 40 How Flexible Operations Would
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