Search

The Army frequently plans adjustments to the stationing of its force structure as weapon systems, missions, and operations change over time, much as a large corporation plans changes to its plant infrastructure as product demand and technology change over time. Optimization models have long played a key role in developing these corporate plans (for example, see Brown et al 2001 and their references). On any given day, the Army has up to 100 units moving to meet new stationing requirements and our decision-support model, Optimal Stationing of Army Forces (OSAF), has recently helped guide some of these decisions in the United States. For example, OSAF suggested potential locations for rotary-wing training, and also helped determine a new home for the United States Army Southern Command. The Army is legislatively more encumbered in its infrastructure decisions than corporate counterparts. A complex, politically insulated process for closing and realigning military installations in the United States is provided by Title XXIX of Public Law 101-510 (the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991) as amended. This act established an independent Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission and set in motion a process known as BRAC for 1991, 1993, and 1995, to be applied to installations in the United States. The law authorizing these three rounds has been remarkably successful in allowing the Department of Defense (DOD) to eliminate excess infrastructure Government Accounting Office 2001. Since 1995, the DOD has urged Congress to authorize additional BRAC rounds and in 2002 received authorization for a round in 2005.

This project documents the updates of databases and algorithms required for the Optimal Stationing of Army Forces Model (OSAF) and examines several issues that might impact Army stationing decisions. This essentially serves as an extension of past Center for Army Analysis (CAA) stationing analysis (OSAF, CAA-R-01-42) and provides a reference for future analyses Research topics include Government Accounting Office reports on lessons learned from past analyses, Federal Government Corporation possibilities, public-private-partnerships, industrial base opportunities, market valuations, and privatization We document model updates, discuss each research topic, provide historical examples, and provide suggestions on the topics' impact on future analyses and Army stationing decisions.

The Assistant Chief of Staff for Installation Management tasked the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) to develop and demonstrate an analytical capability to systematically examine Army stationing alternatives. The alternatives are distinguishable by the force structure, amount of implementation dollars available, and stationing restrictions. These elements and installation capacities comprise the analytical framework and are the primary model inputs, and each is discussed in detail in this report.