Improving bare base agile combat support: a comparative analysis between land basing and afloat prepositioning of bare-base support equipment

Air Force Journal of Logistics,  Summer, 2004  by Joseph E. Diana

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The next area for consideration is service and DoD support. The forward support locations most likely would be aligned with specific combatant commanders. This alignment with AOR-specific OPLANs would provide solid support during the budget process and allow both combatant commanders and the Air Force to weigh in on funding issues. The afloat option would be multi-AOR committed, which could either strengthen support from multiple combatant commanders of put the program in a seam with a support void. The best chance for success for ah afloat option would be to designate an afloat asset as AOR specific, similar to the current concept used for Air Force munitions prepositioned on ships.

Force protection is also a consideration for supportability. No military mission can exist in the present environment without considerations for force protection. Many of our expeditionary sites have local hotels or facilities that could be used, but current planners will not even consider those assets because of force protection concerns. (37) Land-based locations can be protected but offer a static target for adversaries to plan against. Ship-based assets are much harder to interdict while underway and, like forward support locations, offer the flexibility of choosing from multiple ports for entry into the AOR. Port operations do present a force protection challenge, but their requirements are temporary in nature (unlike the constant protection needed for a land-based location).

Cost

Costs involved in each option will be assessed for both peacetime and wartime. Fixed and variable cost components will be identified for each option. AFLMA has done an excellent job in providing a cost analysis of afloat versus land-based storage. For peacetime, it found that the afloat option would be more expensive than adding two additional warehouses to the land-based WRM structure (Table 4).

Several caveats need to be made to the results from the October 2001 study. One, the first and third year costs for both programs included $70M in fixed costs to fund the shortages in the bare-base program. Two, AFLMA's land-based model only included two warehouses added to a CONUS-based site. Therefore, estimating the costs for outfitting five forward support locations requires some extrapolation. Not every forward support location would need additional warehouses since some WRM storage already occurs at each of the sites. (39) But the costs for additional warehouses would probably be equal to, if not more than, the land-based model used by AFLMA. Finally, the afloat costs were reworked in a subsequent AFLMA study (released in 2003), which was developed much more and resulted in increased costs to the afloat option. The summary based on the new costs is shown in Table 5 and still includes the fixed cost of $70M in the first and third year to fund shortages in the bare-base program.

In looking at the wartime costs of land versus afloat, AFLMA conducted extensive analysis. Its finding was that: