"Prepared for the United States Air Force."

The U.S. Air Force's (USAF's) current approach to sizing and shaping non-maintenance agile combat support (ACS) manpower often results in a discrepancy between the supply of ACS forces and operational demands because much of ACS is sized and shaped to meet the requirements of home-station installation operations, not expeditionary operations. This report proposes a more enterprise-oriented approach to measuring ACS manpower requirements by synthesizing combatant commander operational plans, Defense Planning Scenarios, functional area deployment rules, and subject-matter expert input. Using these new expeditionary metrics to assess the capacity of the current ACS manpower mix to support expeditionary operations, this report finds that there are imbalances among its career fields relative to expeditionary demands. To address these imbalances, it develops and assesses several rebalanced manpower mixes and finds that the USAF can achieve more expeditionary ACS capacity than it currently has by realigning manpower, and it can realize substantial savings by reducing end strength and substituting civilian billets for military billets.

Uses a companion architecture to identify and describe where shortfalls exist between current agile combat support (ACS) processes and the vision for integrating enhanced ACS processes into Air Force command and control.

This report encapsulates the analysis and results of the Air Force-Airline Industry Collaboration project, which investigated the viability of options for the Air Force and commercial airlines to collaborate on issues related to their pilot and maintenance workforces by evaluating benefits, costs, and feasibility from the perspectives of the Air Force and commercial airlines. The report concludes that certain avenues of collaboration, such as scheduling drill weekends in ways that work with airline planning, could benefit both parties.

Reducing aviation fuel use is an ongoing goal for military and civil operators, and Air Mobility Command is feeling increasing pressure to further reduce fuel use by implementing and following known best practices. Although the Air Force had achieved a 12 percent reduction in fuel consumption by March 2012, it must continue to pursue cost-effective options to reduce fuel use even further.

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.

"The focus of this analysis is on how enhanced ACS processes can be implemented and integrated into the Air Force and Joint command and control (C2) enterprise. Using the vision for enhanced C2 provided in the updated architecture developed as a companion piece to this analysis, we identify and describe where shortfalls or major gaps exist between current ACS processes (the AS-IS) and the vision for integrating enhanced ACS processes into Air Force C2 (the TO-BE). We evaluate C2 nodes from the level of the President and Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) to the units and sources of supply. We also evaluate these nodes across the operational phases, from readiness preparation through planning, deployment, employment, sustainment, and reconstitution."--Provided by publisher

This document presents an architecture that describes a TO-BE vision for integrating enhanced ACS processes into Air Force command and control (C2) as it is defined in Joint Publications. This architecture addresses the near-term--what C2 processes could be in the next 4-5 years using current Air Force assets. It first identifies C2 processes and the echelons of command responsible for executing those processes and then describes how enhanced ACS planning, execution, monitoring, and control processes to provide senior leaders with enterprise ACS capability and constraint information. We use this architecture to identify and describe where shortfalls or major gaps exist between current ACS processes (the AS-IS) and this vision for integrating enahcned ACS processes into Air Force C2 (the TO-BE).