Organic or contract support? Investigating cost and performance in aircraft sustainment

Over the past 15 years, the United States Air Force (USAF) has shifted toward utilizing more Contracted Logistics Support (CLS) and away from organic maintenance in their aircraft fleets. Given operating and support costs comprise 53-65% of total life-cycle costs for USAF aircraft, understanding the implications of these sustainment decisions is imperative. Utilizing a maintenance cost per flying hour metric and performing regression analysis, we find the maintenance strategy decision (CLS, mixed, or organic) is the most significant driver. We then examine performance metrics in relation to two established aircraft availability targets. Analysis of variance reveals statistically significant differences between maintenance strategies, with CLS outperforming organic in relation to the targets

Improving Resource Management in the Afghan Air Force

The nascent Afghan Air Force (AAF) is rapidly changing with new platforms programmed and existing platforms expanding. As US and coalition forces draw down, the transition of financial responsibility from American to Afghan processes is on the horizon

A Comparative Analysis of the Cost Estimating Error Risk Associated with Fly Away Costs vs Individual Components of Aircraft

A shrinking workforce, unstable budgets, and rapidly changing objectives under stricter time constraints characterize today\u27s cost analysis and acquisition environment. In concert with this environment, cost analyst positions have rapidly decreased as demonstrated by Aeronautical Systems Centers 54% decline in total authorized slots from 1992 to 2001. The question is how to deal with this more with less\u27 mentality. The purpose of this research is to investigate and measure the risks associated with taking a macro versus micro approach to aircraft cost estimation. By analyzing the fidelity of a cost estimate developed at the flyaway cost level versus a cost estimate developed at the individual components level, this research provides guidelines for appropriate allocation of cost analyst resources, This objective is accomplished by looking at the cost estimation error risk of recurring costs at level one of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and at level two of the WBS, Results show that there is a statistically significant difference between estimating at the differing WBS levels, However, from a practical standpoint, the difference in dollar terms is too small to be considered significant, As a result, program manager should allocate resources based on other constraints such as time allotted to complete the estimate or required level of visibility into the estimat

Providing a Piece of the Puzzle: Insights into the Aircraft Availability Conundrum

Aircraft availability (AA) is a key metric for assessing operational readiness. The declining trend in AA is a documented concern for senior Air Force leaders. This paper aims to investigate the components of non-available time and subsequently focuses on the largest and fastest growing category: not mission capable maintenance unscheduled (NMCMU). Then, utilization of aircraft platforms is examined to determine the readiness benefits of increasing available hours

The Characteristics of Successful Military IT Projects: A Cross-country Empirical Study

In the armed forces, successful digitalization is crucial to ensure effective operations. Much of the existing literature on project factors during the planning and execution phases of public IT projects do not focus specifically on military sector projects. Therefore, the paper aims to provide empirical insights into the characteristics of successful military IT projects. Data from such projects in NATO countries and agencies were collected through interviews and project documents. The findings relating to the main variable of interest, “delivery of client benefit,” supported previous findings on IT project performance. Medium-sized projects performed better than small and large projects, and the agile development method delivered more client benefit than traditional methods. Client involvement apparently had a positive effect on project success. Clearly specified objectives had a statistically significant effect on project success in terms of clients’ benefits. The paper contributes to the gap in research on military IT projects and broadens the project management literature’s focus on time and cost to include delivery of client benefit as a success variable. The use of cross-country data provided unique insights for academics and practitioners regarding which project characteristics affect the successful development and adoption of new software by the armed forces

The characteristics of successful military IT projects: a cross-country empirical study

In the armed forces, successful digitalization is crucial to ensure effective operations. Much of the existing literature on project factors during the planning and execution phases of public IT projects do not focus specifically on military sector projects. Therefore, the paper aims to provide empirical insights into the characteristics of successful military IT projects. Data from such projects in NATO countries and agencies were collected through interviews and project documents. The findings relating to the main variable of interest, “delivery of client benefit,” supported previous findings on IT project performance. Medium-sized projects performed better than small and large projects, and the agile development method delivered more client benefit than traditional methods. Client involvement apparently had a positive effect on project success. Clearly specified objectives had a statistically significant effect on project success in terms of clients’ benefits. The paper contributes to the gap in research on military IT projects and broadens the project management literature’s focus on time and cost to include delivery of client benefit as a success variable. The use of cross-country data provided unique insights for academics and practitioners regarding which project characteristics affect the successful development and adoption of new software by the armed forces

Finding Your (3D) Center: 3D Object Detection Using a Learned Loss

Massive semantically labeled datasets are readily available for 2D images, however, are much harder to achieve for 3D scenes. Objects in 3D repositories like ShapeNet are labeled, but regrettably only in isolation, so without context. 3D scenes can be acquired by range scanners on city-level scale, but much fewer with semantic labels. Addressing this disparity, we introduce a new optimization procedure, which allows training for 3D detection with raw 3D scans while using as little as 5% of the object labels and still achieve comparable performance. Our optimization uses two networks. A scene network maps an entire 3D scene to a set of 3D object centers. As we assume the scene not to be labeled by centers, no classic loss, such as Chamfer can be used to train it. Instead, we use another network to emulate the loss. This loss network is trained on a small labeled subset and maps a non-centered 3D object in the presence of distractions to its own center. This function is very similar – and hence can be used instead of – the gradient the supervised loss would provide. Our evaluation documents competitive fidelity at a much lower level of supervision, respectively higher quality at comparable supervision. Supplementary material can be found at: dgriffiths3.github.io

Air Advising in Afghanistan: Building an Organization in Flight

It is well-known that since 9/11, the US military and its coalition partners have worked with the Afghan government and its military forces to battle an insurgency. At the end of 2014, the majority of US and coalition military forces left Afghanistan. What may be less known is that, for the last several years, a small contingent of American and coalition air advisors have been helping the Afghans rebuild their air force from the ground up. These advisors work daily with Afghanistan Air Force (AAF) leaders to help them build and implement effective organizations, capabilities, technologies, programs, and processes

Monte Carlo Simulation of the Short-time Behaviour of the Dynamic XY Model

Dynamic relaxation of the XY model quenched from a high temperature state to the critical temperature or below is investigated with Monte Carlo methods. When a non-zero initial magnetization is given, in the short-time regime of the dynamic evolution the critical initial increase of the magnetization is observed. The dynamic exponent $\theta$ is directly determined. The results show that the exponent $\theta$ varies with respect to the temperature. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this initial increase of the magnetization is universal, i.e. independent of the microscopic details of the initial configurations and the algorithms.Comment: 14 pages with 5 figures in postscrip

Use of Factors in Development Estimates: Improving the Cost Analysis Toolkit

Factor Estimating is a technique commonly used by defense acquisition analysts to develop cost estimations. However, previous studies developing factors for the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase of the life cycle are limited. This research expands the current toolkit for cost analysts by developing cost factors in previously unexplored areas. More specifically, over 400 cost reports are utilized to create new standard cost factors that are delineated by five categories: commodity type, contract type, contractor type, development type, and Service. The factors are developed for those elements that are common in a wide array of projects such as program management, systems engineering, data, or training. This new factor dataset provides cost analysts with the information necessary to appropriately identify and select the most relevant factors to use when developing future cost estimates. Through statistical analysis, the research also helps identify those elements in which more analysts’ time and energy should be allocated when developing their estimates