Building Agile Combat Support Competencies to Enable Evolving Adaptive Basing Concepts

Abstract

For several years, the U.S. Air Force has been grappling with how to survive and fight in contested, degraded, and operationally limited (CDO) environments, and one of its recent innovations has been the advancement of basing concepts that require significant resilience and mobility of combat forces. Headquarters Air Force (HAF) has sought to bring some of these survivability-focused concepts under one umbrella, which was originally called adaptive basing. As the operational community pursues these concepts, it raises difficult questions as to how the Agile Combat Support (ACS) community would support such concepts. Adaptive basing is not yet the official policy of the Air Force, and it is not the only concept under development for operating in CDO environments. Therefore, the Air Force does not have a clearly defined set of operational requirements from which to develop ACS requirements for capabilities, resources, and training. Nonetheless, the ACS community seeks to understand what it might be called on to provide the operational forces to enable the kind of adaptiveness and agility currently being contemplated. In this report, we review the motivations for adaptive basing, estimate its requirements for ACS, consider the obstacles to fulfilling those requirements, and discuss the implications and recommendations for the ACS community and the Air Force as a whole. We define adaptive basing and provide a framework for thinking about how it operates. In this report, we take a building-block approach, distilling operational concepts and translating them into what they require of ACS forces.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2020
Accession Number
AD1097631

Entities

People

  • Anna J. Wirth
  • Anu Narayanan
  • Daniel P. Felten
  • James A. Leftwich
  • John G. Drew
  • John P. Godges
  • Jonathan W. Welburn
  • Josh Girardini
  • Kristin Van Abel
  • Michael J. Lostumbo
  • Patrick Mills

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Biomedical
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Civil Engineering
  • Combat Forces
  • Combat Operations
  • Command And Control
  • Contingency Operations (Military)
  • Deployment
  • Employment
  • Engineers
  • Logistics
  • Maintenance
  • Maintenance Personnel
  • Military Force Levels
  • Personnel Management
  • Tanker Aircraft
  • Warfare
  • Warning Systems

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Systems Analysis and Design