An efficient missile loadout planning tool for operational planners

This thesis introduces a planning system that decides which missiles to load on which deploying ships to maximize their campaign effectiveness across all anticipated operational theater war plans. Currently, operational planners manually identify missile loadouts and ship assignments with little to no metric to identify if a better plan exists. The load plans must be robust with respect to a range of potential missions and conflicts (we do not get to choose the war we must fight) and must provide adequate defensive ability for each ship and offensive ability of groups of ships. We consider about 30-40 customer combatants with Mark 41 (MK41), Mark 57 (MK57), or any other Vertical Launching System (VLS) variant to appear, including ships home-ported in the U.S. as well as forward-deployed units. There are nine types of missiles, limits on the numbers of each missile type available, the amount of swapping of missiles between ships, compatibility of certain types with certain VLS modules on certain ships and perhaps concern to spread certain missiles equitably among ships. The Excel-based planning system is fast, easy to understand and use, and operates on Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) computers.http://archive.org/details/anefficientmissi1094555657Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited