Developing Combat Support Mission Ready Airmen for Agile Combat Employment

As the U.S. Air Force (USAF) changes how it generates and presents forces in a potential conflict with a peer competitor, it will need a way to develop mission ready airmen (MRA) with a mix of skills and experiences to successfully operate across different types of missions, including those involving dispersed operations under agile combat employment. The path to developing MRA is not straightforward, especially for airmen in combat support (CS) communities, such as maintenance, logistics, engineering, and force protection. CS airmen are not traditionally organized, trained, and used to operate as MRA. Instead, CS MRA will be developed under the Air Force Force Generation Model (AFFORGEN), the USAF’s new force generation construct. To address concerns about developing CS MRA, RAND researchers evaluated the process of organizing, training, and utilizing CS MRA for agile combat employment.

RAND researchers reviewed USAF policy and spoke with USAF policy experts to understand USAF’s latest plans involving AFFORGEN and force presentation models. They interviewed USAF unit leaders and experts about perceived impediments to developing CS airmen as MRA under AFFORGEN and air task forces (ATFs), which USAF was developing at the time of RAND’s analysis. These interviews were followed by a multiday workshop with other USAF leaders and experts—primarily from the CS community—to address these perceived impediments. Finally, they developed and ran simulation models that assigned CS airmen to ATFs and evaluated training proficiency and costs associated with CS airmen development under AFFORGEN.