No abstract

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

Because the needs of the United States and the threats it faces are continuously evolving, the balance between the active and reserve components of the U.S. armed forces is a perennial challenge for the U.S. Department of Defense. Aspects include how rapidly and in what quantity reserve component units can be made ready to deploy to meet the demands of a sudden, large overseas conflict, such as an Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm-like event or a possible conflict on the Korean peninsula. The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs asked RAND to explore these questions for Army units and to examine what can be done to maximize the number of ready forces from the Army's reserve components available to support such a conflict. This study focuses on the initial deployment speed of Army Reserve units, taking training requirements as an input, and assuming that trained and mobilized units will be ready to perform assigned roles once deployed.The research in this report focuses on how the dynamics of the mobilization process for reserve component units can, or should, affect decisionmaking about force mix, as well as how policy and resourcing decisions can either enhance or inhibit the speed and efficiency of reserve component mobilization. It is intended to inform officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army who are making decisions on the force structure balance between the active and reserve Army components or decisions on investments in readiness of the reserve components. The main body of this report includes technical details and assumes a familiarity with the concepts iv Throughput-Based Analysis Of Army Active/Reserve Component Mix of mobilization planning and basic optimization. We aim to draw conclusions and insights in an accessible way throughout the report.Our research is based on information gleaned from discussions with key Army commands and organizations involved in the planning and execution of force flows, mobilization, and training, combined with analytic modeling of the mobilization and postmobilization training processes. This work allowed us to identify those factors that have the greatest impact on increasing the ability to mobilize ready-todeploy reserve component units in support of a major conflict, as well as those factors that have little effect on this.

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

No abstract