Analysis of Global Management of Air Force War Reserve Materiel to Support Operations in Contested and Degraded Environments

📖 The Scoop

Because adversaries have developed capabilities that may restrict or deny U.S. forces' access to a given area, the operational environment of the future may be different from the environment that the U.S. military has been accustomed to over the past 30 years. Prepositioning select war reserve materiel (WRM) may help mitigate vulnerabilities associated with operating in a contested, degraded, or operationally limited environment. In this report, RAND researchers evaluate management approaches and global prepositioning strategies for WRM postures in such environments. They describe conditions under which global management practices are advantageous and then propose methods that a global manager of WRM could employ to improve support of air component operational warfighting demands. Specifically, the authors demonstrate ways to standardize and validate determination processes for WRM requirements, establish a WRM prioritization schema, relate WRM priority to positioning postures, analyze trade-offs through modeling, and assess partner-nation risk.

Genre: Business & Economics / Management (fancy, right?)