Optimizing Procurement of Special Operations Weapons and Equipment

Abstract

The Joint Operational Stock (JOS) is a centrally-located inventory of Special-Operations- peculiar weapons and equipment, managed by the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). New procurement of JOS weapons and equipment is currently planned by manually prioritizing the item-wise shortfalls experienced in the JOS inventory during the previous year. This method has not always provided convincing justification for finding, as indicated by the loss of such finding in fiscal year 1999. Also, new technology and other items not historically demanded must be handled in an ad-hoc fashion. We introduce a procurement planning tool that seeks to maximize the ability to completely loadout special operations missions by coordinating year-by-year procurement of individual items. Rather than focus just on history, we concentrate on supporting future missions over an entire multi-year planning horizon. The plans are quickly suggested by a simple greedy myopic heuristic that we show to produce almost-optimal advice.

Document Details

• Document Type: Technical Report
• Publication Date: Jun 01, 2000
• Accession Number: ADA381319

Entities

People

• Michael A. Pfarrer

Organizations

• Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

• Ground and Sea Platforms
• Space
• Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

• Acquisition
• Computer Programs
• Graphical User Interface
• Inventory
• Laser Target Designators
• Linear Programming
• Mathematical Programming
• National Security
• Night Vision
• Operations Research
• Procurement
• Special Operations Forces
• Target Designators
• Unconventional Warfare
• United States
• United States Special Operations Command
• Warfare

Readers

• Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.
• Naval Personnel Management
• Operations Research

Technology Areas

• Fully Networked C3
• Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control