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"Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense."
"The Department of Defense (DOD) spends billions of dollars each year to sustain its weapon systems. These operating and support (O&S) costs can account for a significant portion of a system's total life-cycle costs and include costs for repair parts, maintenance, and personnel. The Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 directs GAO to review the growth in O&S costs of major systems. GAO's report addresses (1) the extent to which life-cycle O&S cost estimates developed during acquisition and actual O&S costs are available for program management and decision making; (2) the extent to which DOD uses life-cycle O&S cost estimates after systems are fielded to quantify cost growth and identify its causes; and (3) the efforts taken by DOD to reduce O&S costs for major systems. GAO selected seven aviation systems that reflected varied characteristics and have been fielded at least several years. These systems were the F/A-18E/F, F-22A, B-1B, F-15E, AH-64D, CH-47D, and UH-60L. "
Airworthiness, as a field, encompasses the technical and non-technical activities required to design, certify, produce, maintain, and safely operate an aircraft throughout its lifespan. The evolving technology, science, and engineering methods and, most importantly, aviation regulation, offer new opportunities and create, new challenges for the aviation industry. This book assembles review and research articles across a variety of topics in the field of airworthiness: aircraft maintenance, safety management, human factors, cost analysis, structures, risk assessment, unmanned aerial vehicles and regulations. This selection of papers informs the industry practitioners and researchers on important issues.
This research examines the relationship between operating and support (O & S) costs and usage of Air Force aircraft to improve resource allocation. Currently the Air Force uses an average cost metric to forecast costs related to flying hours. Problems arise with the accuracy of the cost per flying hour (CPFH) factors when the relationship between cost and usage is either nonlinear or includes nontrivial fixed costs. Superficially, it may seem reasonable that if the Air Force flies an aircraft twice as many hours, O & S costs should double. However, empirical evidence shows that the doubling of flying hours actually increases non-fuel operating and support costs by less than that amount. This finding is consistent with nontrivial fixed costs, challenging the validity of the current proportional budgeting metric. Another aspect to forecasting Air Force budgets is whether O & S costs vary with flying hours or with the number of aircraft. The Air Force currently groups O & S budget components into three cost categories: variable with flying hours, variable with the number of aircraft, and fixed costs. The authors find that the high correlation between flying hours and the number of aircraft prevents one variable from outperforming the other in predictive models. Fuel cost is the only category with clear statistical evidence to support the use of flying hours over aircraft inventory in predictive models. The Air Force can improve its allocation of O & S resources by altering the current proportional CPFH metrics to better accommodate fixed costs. When the authors apply the findings of this research to budget projections, they see substantial differences to forecasts created with the status quo metrics. This is an important difference for Air Force budget planning, particularly during the transition periods that precede and follow major contingency operations.
The Routledge Handbook of Air Power offers a comprehensive overview of the political purposes and military importance of air power. Despite its increasing significance in international relations, statecraft and war, the phenomenon of air power remains controversial and little understood beyond its tactical and technological prominence. This volume provides a comprehensive survey designed to contribute to a deep and sophisticated understanding of air power. Containing contributions from academics and service personnel, the book comprises five sections: - Part I Foundation: the essence of air power - Part II Roles and functions: delivering air power - Part III Cross-domain integration: applying air power - Part IV Political–social–economic environment: air power in its strategic context - Part V Case studies: air power in its national context Examining a series of themes and factors that contribute to an understanding of the utility and applicability of air power, this Handbook focuses on the essence of air power, identifies its roles and functions, and places air power in its wider strategic and national contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Air Power will be of great interest to students of air power, strategic studies, defence studies, security studies and IR, as well as to military professionals and policy-makers.
Systematically examining the empirical relationship between multiple U.S. Air Force systems' expenditures, flying hours, and fleet sizes, this research suggests a more sophisticated way to think about Air Force costs than is currently used. The report discusses prior research on cost-per-flying-hour calculations--i.e., the practice of multiplying projected flying hours by a cost-per-hour factor in certain segments of the budgetary process. This report looks across Air Force mission designs (systems) and estimates general, historical relationships between expenditure levels and flying hours. A fixed-plus-variable cost structure is estimated with expenditures neither increasing nor decreasing in proportion to flying hours. The author concludes with the policy implications of his findings, noting that current Air Force budgeting approaches likely overestimate funding needs when flying hours are increasing and underestimate needs when flying hours are decreasing.
As early as the 1960s, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) identified a requirement for managing and collecting Operating and Support (O/S) costs for major weapon systems. O/S costs have become the most significant part of Life Cycle (LCC) as the complexity of weapon systems has increased. For many weapon systems the O/S cost exceeds 60% of the total LCC. The collection, organization, and publication of O/S cost data is one of the major problems of the cost analysis community. A plethora of O/S cost data is currently collected by individual organizations for the development or expansion of their internal data bases, but these data are normally unavailable or unknown to the remainder of the user community. This results in duplication of effort, unawareness of specific cost data, and many additional hours of research in locating and evaluating cost data.