Air force deployments: estimating the requirement

Air Force Journal of Logistics, Summer, 2006 by Don Snyder, Patrick Mills

Introduction

Flying combat aircraft out of deployed locations frequently requires deploying thousands of people and thousands of tons of equipment. Determining how much and what kind of each is not easy. Nevertheless, deploying the right amount and types of equipment and people is very important, both during the execution of contingency operations and for planning purposes. During operations, not having enough resources causes risk of not being able to perform the mission. Taking too much risk delays operations, because of unnecessarily tying up lift, or impairs operations elsewhere by unnecessarily tying up resources. During planning, misestimating the resources needed for deployments may lead to a force structure of the wrong size or balance to meet future national security needs.

Whether done for executing a contingency operation or for planning purposes, deployment resource requirements are principally expressed in the form of unit type codes (UTCs). UTCs are sets of equipment and manpower resources needed to perform a specified capability. They vary considerably in size, and the requirements for a deployment to a single base can involve over a hundred UTCs. Various approaches have been used to estimate which UTCs are needed for deployments.

Force Deployment Requirements

The direct way is to assemble an ad hoc group of subject matter experts for all relevant functional areas and have them assess their resource needs given relevant operational details of the contingency. We call this the ad hoc approach to deployment planning. This approach generally begins with a site survey and input information from operational planners giving details of aircraft to be bedded down, sortie rates, and other relevant factors. Requirements for each functional area are estimated by experts in that area. For example, given the size and numbers of aircraft expected at a base, civil engineers can estimate the water flow needed to meet fire-fighting needs. From this estimate, they determine how many and what types of trucks to deploy. Given the trucks, they in turn estimate the manning and managerial staffing. Other functional areas go through similar, often more complicated, procedures to estimate their resources. For many functional areas, however, the work does not stop at this point because the resource requirements in one area may impact another. For example, civil engineers planning for base support needs--such as number of billets and water and power requirements--need to know how many personnel are expected at the site. This number is determined by the sum of all the other functional areas' requirements. This interdependency forces some communication among the functional area experts, or iteration of estimates, or both. The process necessarily engages numerous personnel and consumes considerable time.

A second way is to determine, in advance of deployments, what is expected to be needed for a nominal deployment location. Such an effort has been recently pursued in the form of force modules. Force modules are sets of UTCs for supporting operations at a nominal location. Within the Air Force, the current implementation of force modules has been developed to estimate the resources needed to operate out of an austere deployed location. Five force modules have been developed.

* Open the base

* Establish the base

* Operate the base

* Provide command and control

* Generate the mission.

These modules represent an integrated capability that crosses many functional areas. The modules not only list UTCs, but also specify the order in which they need to arrive. The task of creating these force modules and testing their deployment at the Eagle Flag exercise has caused UTC contents and sizes to be adjusted for modularity.

Force modules can be viewed as a special case of the ad hoc approach to planning. Groups of subject matter experts have gone through the same process of building a UTC list as in the case for real deployments, except in the case of force modules, the target location is a generic, nominal bare base. Some of the assumptions made in the development of force modules are as follows.

* The base has a water source that can be made potable within 10 days.

* The base has limited fuel storage capability, but fuel is available from the host nation.

* General purpose vehicles can be obtained from the host nation.

* The base has a low to medium threat exposure. (1)

Having studied in advance the needs of a nominal deployed location and made a list of the required UTCs clearly saves time and effort when executing contingencies.

Both of these approaches to estimating deployment requirements have benefits and shortcomings. To see these more clearly, consider the Air Force expeditionary activities of the past few years. To support these contingencies, the Air Force has deployed to dozens of locations, nearly all of them unique in their support requirements. Total numbers of Air Force aircraft at these sites ranged from fewer than ten to more than a hundred. Different airframes have been collocated more often than not. In over half of the locations, aircraft from other services or coalition partners have shared the base with the Air Force. Additionally, the existing infrastructure at these locations varied widely. A few are truly bare bases, whereas more commonly, the airfield has some kind of usable infrastructure that reduces the resources the Air Force needs to deploy, such as an international airport or coalition partner military airbase. Locations with usable infrastructure also vary considerably, both in the nature of the infrastructure and in how much is made available to deploying forces. Locations of recent deployments indicate that not only is there no typical base in the sense of infrastructure and numbers and types of aircraft, there are scarcely two that are alike.