Overseas Basing of U.S. Military Forces: An Assessment of Relative Costs and Strategic Benefits by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8330-7915-2
Publisher: RAND Corporation
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Training Costs

The services sometimes operate their forces differently overseas than when they are stationed in the United States. This may be as a result of partner-nation training and exercises, constraints on U.S. activities, or a desire to generate more presence or combat capability. To capture these differences, we directly use service-provided data and models to compute training costs for this portion of the cost analysis.

For the USAF, we used data from the Air Force Total Ownership Cost (AFTOC) database to determine unit training costs by aircraft type and command.10 We estimated the total training cost per aircraft per year using data from FY 2009 to FY 2011. The results are shown in Table 8.1, which shows the average training cost per aircraft per year for the primary aircraft currently stationed at overseas installations.11 For each aircraft type, the left two columns show the unit operating costs at Air Combat Command and Air Mobility Command (AMC), both located in the United States. The right two columns show the costs for the same aircraft located in either the Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) or USAFE. We use these costs as inputs when calculating the costs and savings of changes to the overseas posture based on the number of aircraft moving from one command or region to another.

Some costs are comparable across regions (within 5 or 10 percent), and some are significantly higher or lower. Recent RAND research has analyzed these costs in detail for USAFE and sheds some light on these differences. In particular, costs for depot-level reparables and munitions for USAFE units were generally found to be lower for fighter/attack aircraft than for their U.S. counterparts. These are believed to be lower due to flying restrictions in Europe that reduce consumption rates for those assets.12

Table 8.1

Air Force Aircraft Annual Training Costs, by Type and Command

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