Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) has been developing Agile Combat Employment to address operational challenges and ensure its ability to prosecute a contested campaign. The authors of this report demonstrate a method for PACAF to estimate potential sortie rate degradation from dispersal across bases before bases are attacked.

Assessing Agile Combat Employment for the Pacific Air Forces

Estimating the Impacts of Distributed Maintenance Postures on Sortie Rate Potential

Patrick Mills, Rachel Costello, Matthew Sargent, Colby P. Steiner

ResearchPublished Sep 6, 2024

Cover: Assessing Agile Combat Employment for the Pacific Air Forces
Download PDF
Additional Downloads

Includes Research Summary

China is investing in advanced aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles, and hypersonic weapons capable of striking U.S. and allied operating bases in the Pacific. Since at least fiscal year 2014, Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) has been developing and refining a concept, now called Agile Combat Employment (ACE), to address its unique operational challenges, deter possible aggression, and ensure its ability prosecute a contested campaign. At its root, ACE requires deploying and employing aircraft (particularly fighters) in nontraditional ways (particularly in dispersed and clustered postures) to mitigate threats from precision cruise and ballistic missiles. Dispersal across bases offers protection from missile attacks, and many analyses have quantified the potential benefits of dispersal both within and outside the context of ACE.

The authors of this report demonstrate a method for PACAF to estimate potential sortie rate degradation from dispersal across bases before bases are attacked.

Key Findings

Flying longer sorties degrades sortie potential in two ways

  • More hours on the plane in operation increases the number of needed maintenance actions.
  • More hours on the plane in flight reduces the number of available hours in the day to accomplish maintenance actions on a given plane.

Sortie potential can be degraded by base dispersal via two mechanisms

  • Smaller detachment sizes at each location allow fewer spare aircraft to be available to achieve given sortie schedules.
  • Longer backshop repair times result from having less maintenance capacity on-site, thus necessitating moving the aircraft to the maintenance capacity or vice versa.

Both smaller detachment sizes and longer maintenance times can quantifiably degrade sortie potential, and both factors together have an even more significant impact

  • Maintenance times used were hypothetical but plausible; further work could illuminate the sortie potential of dispersed maintenance concepts.

Topics

Document Details

Citation

RAND Style Manual
Mills, Patrick, Rachel Costello, Matthew Sargent, and Colby P. Steiner, Assessing Agile Combat Employment for the Pacific Air Forces: Estimating the Impacts of Distributed Maintenance Postures on Sortie Rate Potential, RAND Corporation, RR-A999-3, 2024. As of September 23, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA999-3.html
Chicago Manual of Style
Mills, Patrick, Rachel Costello, Matthew Sargent, and Colby P. Steiner, Assessing Agile Combat Employment for the Pacific Air Forces: Estimating the Impacts of Distributed Maintenance Postures on Sortie Rate Potential. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA999-3.html.
BibTeX RIS

Research conducted by

The research described in this report was commissioned by the Office of the Director of Strategy, Plans, Programs, and Requirements, Headquarters, Pacific Air Forces, and conducted within the Resource Management Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE.

This publication is part of the RAND research report series. Research reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND research reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.