In light of increasing Special Operations Forces (SOF) mission requirements, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) requires a tool for planning to fulfill force requirements of the most valuable missions while sustaining SOF capabilities within operations tempo constraints. Currently, USSOCOM stakeholders attend numerous meetings throughout the year to qualitatively determine which missions will be fulfilled with available units. For this cycle, USSOCOM has implemented an additional meeting to create a prioritized mission list from which analysts can allocate units. This research introduces an optimization model to provide USSOCOM with insights to improve the current process for the allocation of unit resources to annual mission priorities by using a multi-period inventory model to optimize the allocation of units to missions by maximizing mission prioritization subject to unit availability. This model automates the allocation process and provides analysts a tool that efficiently analyzes unit to mission allocations. With an analyst's interpretation of our model, the stakeholders and decision makers are equipped with the knowledge of specific resource limitations prohibiting the fulfillment of missions to make better-informed decisions on which missions requiring the same limited resources to fulfill, or on how to obtain the necessary resources.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

http://archive.org/details/optimizingglobal1094551563

Major, United States Army