Notes from the Stockpile seminar

Open Access

Abstract

A seminar was held to review some of the models used by the armed services for planning weapon procurement. Most of the effort was spent on the Navy's NNOR and the Air Force's Sabre Mix Methodologies. Even in an emergency situation, it is difficult to speed up the production rate of sophisticated, modern weapons. The time constant for increasing production rate for many weapons seems to be on the order of a year, whereas major wars are sometimes imagined to last for only several months. Given these supposed facts, the following question would seem to be crucial for the yearly POM process: How should a fixed budget be spent augmenting the current stockpile of weapons so as to maximize the effectiveness of the resulting stockpile? Operations Research techniques could play an important role in answering the question, since several favorable preconditions exist: The question must be asked repetitively, Combat modelling must inevitably be involved in assessing effectiveness, Lots of data are available that must be taken into account, and The problem of determining the best stockpile can be interpreted as one of mathematical optimization. For example, shows for a typical weapon the comparison between inventory and the Navy's 'programming objective profile' as determined by the NNOR (Non-Nuclear Ordnance Requirements). There is clearly a large difference between the two, particularly if the gap is compared to the yearly stockpile increment. One way of resolving the discrepancy between budgets and requirements would be to reassess requirements (possibly also budgets) until feasibility is finally achieved ; Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA. ; http://archive.org/details/notesfromstockpi00boge