Resourcing for defense: Solving the roles and missions puzzle

One of the most important issues facing the post-Cold War U.S. defense establishment concerns the future allocation of combat tasks and responsibilities among different branches of the armed forces. The challenge is to reduce unnecessary redundancy across roles and missions when resources are highly constrained, without compromising military effectiveness. Defining the policy problem as one of resource allocation rather than operational effectiveness, we develop a methodology for allocating roles and missions. Our methodology focuses at the highest level of force aggregation and uses a mathematical programming model to produce cross-service cross-mission trade-offs that will yield the best total force combat and non-combat potential within resource consumption constraints.