In many potential operating environments, the U.S. Air Force faces adversaries that are increasingly capable of limiting where and how it projects combat power. Whether the environments are called anti-access/area denial environments or contested, degraded, and operationally limited (CDO) environments, they feature adversaries with larger numbers of more-precise missiles that have further reach than before and that threaten traditional U.S. air bases like never before. To persevere in CDO environments, the Air Force and regional warfighting commanders are exploring a variety of alternative force deployment and employment concepts under an umbrella initiative called adaptive basing (AB). Upon surveying the variety of concepts categorized as part of AB, the authors found that all of them-adaptive or not-can be characterized as survival strategies. Thus, AB is less about increasing the adaptiveness of aircraft and air forces than it is about extending their survivability through strategies that are both traditional and adaptive. In this report, RAND researchers review the motivations for AB, describe a footprint model used for estimating the AB implications for Agile Combat Support (ACS), estimate the ACS requirements to perform three fundamental competencies that can enable AB concepts, consider the obstacles to supporting those requirements, and discuss the implications and recommendations for the ACS community and the Air Force at large. Ultimately, it will take a more-concerted, deliberate, and organized effort to flesh out and refine AB concepts into useable warfighting tools. Some concepts might be discarded for reasons of feasibility, cost, or effectiveness, but if the threats perceived today are credible, AB ought to be tested and found wanting rather than declared to be too difficult without sufficient investigation.

There are concerns that the rate at which China and Russia can field new technologies exceeds the rate at which the U.S. Air Force can replicate those technologies in operational test and training infrastructure (OTTI). The authors of this report estimate the rate at which China and Russia field new threats and examine the costs and benefits of keeping Air Force OTTI at pace with new adversary capabilities.

Concerns about the financial solvency of the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and the stability of supply chains that are key to national security prompted the U.S. government and Department of Defense (DoD) to make policy changes and investments to support the DIB during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The health of small businesses was of particular concern because these companies can have limited visibility in supply chains and are often more vulnerable to financial disruptions. In this exploratory analysis of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) data, the authors summarize investments in DIB businesses that received assistance during the early months of the pandemic (through mid-2020). Descriptive analytics of open source data revealed that the PPP offered financial assistance that reached many small businesses in the manufacturing industry, an important sector for national security supply chains whose production was especially hard hit by the COVID-19 crisis.

Using patent filings, the authors analyze the current position of the United States relative to China in selected technology areas of interest to the Department of the Air Force.

In 2016, Congress directed the U.S. Coast Guard to establish the Great Lakes National Center of Expertise for Oil Spill Preparedness and Response. This report makes recommendations for the center, its staffing, potential partnerships, and location.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy emphasizes the need for the United States to restore warfighting readiness and field a lethal force capable of defeating aggression by a major power. One element of meeting this goal is enabling units to train in an environment that is sufficiently representative of the threats posed by a major power. For U.S. Air Force (USAF) fighter pilots, this means training at ranges with appropriate airspace, threat emitters, targets, and electronic support measures. Currently, few USAF training ranges have the capabilities to provide fighter pilots with adequate training. The USAF is now developing a plan to upgrade some of its existing ranges with capabilities required to provide advanced training (beyond just fifth-generation fighters) and is considering potential fighter squadron restationing options that would improve access to upgraded training ranges. This tool presents the technical details of an optimization model to analyze the effectiveness of these options.

The authors of this report evaluate the costs and benefits of maintenance manpower force structures in the U.S. Air Force that merge maintenance career fields in different ways, including alternatives that are being explored by the Air Force today.

Because adversaries have developed capabilities that may restrict or deny U.S. forces' access to a given area, the operational environment of the future may be different from the environment that the U.S. military has been accustomed to over the past 30 years. Prepositioning select war reserve materiel (WRM) may help mitigate vulnerabilities associated with operating in a contested, degraded, or operationally limited environment. In this report, RAND researchers evaluate management approaches and global prepositioning strategies for WRM postures in such environments. They describe conditions under which global management practices are advantageous and then propose methods that a global manager of WRM could employ to improve support of air component operational warfighting demands. Specifically, the authors demonstrate ways to standardize and validate determination processes for WRM requirements, establish a WRM prioritization schema, relate WRM priority to positioning postures, analyze trade-offs through modeling, and assess partner-nation risk.