Resourcing for defense: Solving the roles and missions puzzle

One of the most important issues facing the post-Cold War U.S. defense esta blishment concerns the future allocation of combat tasks and responsibiliti es among different branches of the armed forces. The challenge is to reduce unnecessary redundancy across roles and missions when resources are highly constrained, without compromising military effectiveness. Defining the pol icy problem as one of resource allocation rather than operational effective ness, we develop a methodology for allocating roles and missions. Our metho dology focuses at the highest level of force aggregation and uses a mathema tical programming model to produce cross-service cross-mission trade-offs t hat will yield the best total force combat and non-combat potential within resource consumption constraints.