A Framework for Examining Global Posture to Enable Agile and Responsive Operations

As the U.S. Air Force (USAF) continues to prioritize speed, deployability, adaptability, flexibility, and resilience, it must evaluate its prepositioning strategies and the risks of malpositioning critical assets. The positioning of resources represents a set of choices and assumptions—whether explicit or implicit—about warfighting objectives, available transportation, and anticipated adversary engagement. If resources are positioned close to their end points of use, delivery times are shorter, and there is less reliance on transportation resources at the time of need. More-centralized postures require fewer storage locations and allow for resource allocation prioritization at the time of need. A global posture must balance competing demands.

In this report, RAND researchers developed a three-stage framework to help decisionmakers explore the posture trade space for a generic asset. This repeatable framework provides a way to explore and visualize interdependent and conflicting influences and their relative importance on prepositioning decisions. The framework can be applied to a broad set of USAF assets but is best used with clearly-defined use cases and requirements. Decisionmakers can use this framework to guide complex posture decisions using specific requirements, constraints, and priorities to determine a posture design.