all available active-duty, reserve and retired Marine officers) and 27,000 billets. The small amount of PC computing time that the system spends on this very large assignment problem includes the production of output suitable for generating orders-to-report via MAILGRAM. Prior to our work, the only tool the Marine Corps had to help with mobilization assignment was a mainframe-based system which takes two to four days to complete a mobilization. The new system is not only much faster, but it also produces significantly better assignments than the old system with respect to all measures of effectiveness considered. Keywords: Military appreciations; Manpower; Optimization; Networks. (sdw)

The ability to rapidly mobilize the Marine Corps in times of crisis is a cornerstone of United States defense strategy. We present a network- optimization based system which, in conjunction with carefully designed and scrupulously maintained manpower databases, assigns Marine officers to mobilization billets. The system is installed on a 386-based personal computer, and takes less than 10 minutes to complete a mobilization involving as many as 40,000 officers (i.e.

prepared in conjunction with research funded under the Naval Postgraduate School Research Council Research Program

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

http://archive.org/details/mobilizingmarine00baus