Air Force Capability Development Planning

📖 The Scoop

In view of uncertainties about the future threat environment, trajectories of technological development, and shifting budgeting priorities, RAND Project AIR FORCE examined analytical methods that would best guide the recently established Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability in capability development planning (CDP), as well as concept development and future force design. In their review, researchers found that specific methods of decisionmaking under deep uncertainty (DMDU) can provide the most suitable means for arriving at solutions that are flexible, adaptable, and robust and guiding investment pathways and modernization efforts. The method highlighted, Robust Decisionmaking, rests on a simple concept. Rather than using models and data to assess policies under a single set of assumptions, RDM runs models over hundreds to thousands of different sets of assumptions about the problem space with the aim of understanding how plans perform under many plausible conditions. Each of the four steps of RDM-decision-framing, case generation, vulnerability assessment and scenario discovery, and trade-off analysis-feeds into the next, providing stakeholders and decisionmakers with a more informed tradespace. By exposing vulnerabilities of different options under different scenarios, RDM can enable stakeholders to engage in a rich dialogue about which risks or vulnerabilities are acceptable, as well as to review assumptions made in framing the problem and make adjustments as needed.

Genre: History / Military / Strategy (fancy, right?)