Rachel Costello

This report describes the 2021 U. S. Air Force-sponsored Plan Blue game, which examined competition against Russia in the Arctic with a focus on the role of sensing in competition and featured robust participation from regional partners and allies. The purpose of the game was to increase understanding of the capabilities, postures, and alliance command, control, and communication relationships that may be called for in future Arctic operations.

Authors present a framework for evaluating combat support requirements, basing posture vulnerabilities, operational resilience, and mitigation strategies to support combat operations in a denied environment. Analysts can assess combat support design vulnerabilities against attacks by near-peer or regional powers and the costs, effectiveness, and risks of alternative strategies to mitigate potential adversary anti-access/area-denial capabilities.

This guide helps analysts use the RAND-developed Theater Air Base Resiliency Optimization Model (TAB-ROM) tool, version 2.0, which identifies the most cost-effective mitigation options to consider in the event of a missile attack on an air base.

The U. S. Air Force manages any proposed significant changes and additions regarding the location of weapon systems and personnel through its strategic basing process. This report is an independent analysis of the Air Force s basing process and the quality of the underlying data. It seeks to inform decisionmakers on potential improvements to the data and assessment criteria used in making basing decisions."

This report proposes new metrics to measure expeditionary agile combat support (ACS) capacity and uses these metrics to assess the capacity of the current ACS manpower mix to support expeditionary operations, finding that there are imbalances among its career fields relative to expeditionary demands. This report develops and assesses several rebalanced manpower mixes to address these imbalances.