Optimization-based military capital planning

Abstract

The United States military carefully plans and justifies its materiel procurements. These decisions have a profound, long-term impact on our ability to defend our nation, and to fight and win our nation's wars. Annual U.S. materiel investment is now larger than that of the rest of the world combined, and attracts keen attention from political leaders and government contractors. Procurement plans are complicated by their influence on domestic technology and production abilities, conflicted objectives, concerns regarding interoperability and maintainability of the materiel, and the sheer scale of the endeavor. Mathematical optimization models have long played a key role in unraveling the complexities of capital planning, and the military has lead the development and use of such models. We survey the history of optimizing civilian and military capital plans and then present prototypic models exhibiting features that render these models useful for real-world decision support.