OPTIMIZING THE SUSTAINMENT NETWORK FOR EXPEDITIONARY ADVANCED BASE OPERATIONS

The Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept places small, distributed forces within a contested environment to achieve strategic effects. However, current sustainment platforms and infrastructure lack the ability to provide required support in the context of EABO. As such, the Marine Corps must develop a novel resilient and robust distribution network capable of providing responsive sustainment to forces conducting EABO. To solve this problem, we develop a two-stage stochastic mixed integer linear program that seeks to minimize the cost of instantiating and operating a sustainment network across a range of possible in-context scenarios. Among the network’s constraints are demand, cost, capacity, risk, and supply considerations. Of these constraints, demand introduces the most uncertainty. Fluctuations in demand come from a variety of factors to include intensity of conflict, attrition, and other combat dynamics. Through the explicit and judicious modeling of such uncertainty, our model provides solutions that are robust to a wide range of demand scenarios. By implementing our model in a notional operational scenario in the South China Sea, we provide results and insights that ultimately assist the Marine Corps by providing an analytical basis for determining an optimal network comprised of locations, capacities, and prepositioning quantities for sustaining forces conducting EABO in the western Pacific. Outstanding Thesis Captain, United States Marine Corps Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.