The Strategic Level Optimization of Air to Ground Missiles for Turkish Air Force Decision Support System

Inventory Management is one of the most important elements in military systems, especially if it is an ammunition inventory. To determine the optimum types and levels of ammunition a military needs, the probable needs of each type have to be calculated in peace time. Although the Turkish Air Force has Strategic Plans that show detailed potential war scenarios, there are many different ways to accomplish a war mission depending on the type of ammunition that is used. In this research, the need for air-to-ground missiles is calculated using a Weapon-Target Assignment algorithm with cost minimization, bomb usage minimization, and effect maximization objectives. The model calculates different combinations of bombs for each objective and shows the main tradeoffs between many cheap dumb bombs and a few expensive smart bombs, the total cost of the operation, and the total effects of the operation on targets using the current inventory. The preferences of Decision Makers will shape this inventory based on these tradeoffs. To aid in the modeling, the number of strategies that can be created with the inventory is calculated using multinomial theory