Enhancing Department of the Air Force Combat Support Analytic Capabilities

The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) stresses that, in contested environments, U.S. military forces must be able to fight through potential adversary attacks on air bases, supply chains, and communication networks. This strategy emphasizes the need for enhanced combat support analyses that show the effectiveness, costs, and risks of decisions to achieve operational resilience. One of its most important aspects is that the support network must be postured in a manner that enables the agility and resiliency of forces when faced with attacks from potential adversaries.

In this paper, the authors update a 2002 vision for how iterative and integrated enterprise-wide combat support analyses can be used to improve critical operations planning and execution decisions over the force employment, development, and design time horizons. They discuss the progress that the Department of the Air Force (DAF) has made in developing and institutionalizing the combat support analytic capabilities called for in the 2002 vision; selecting organizations to conduct enterprise-wide global integrated combat support analyses; and updating governance, doctrine, policy, and education to guide the use and improvement of enhanced analytic capabilities. They also note the need for ongoing efforts to codify these analytic requirements in doctrine, policy, regulations, and operating instructions; assign organizational responsibilities to conduct these analyses; and establish a governance structure to continuously guide the development and enhancement of the analytic capabilities over time.