DATA FARMING THE MARINE CORPS' READINESS AND AVAILABILITY TOOL

The 2018 National Defense Strategy describes the worldwide threat environment as one in which our military advantage is eroding and where interstate competition is now the most prevalent threat. Reducing the time needed to deploy forces to counter these threats is essential to national security. A key enabler of this is the operational readiness of the force. The Marine Corps’ Readiness and Availability Tool (RAT) provides insight to Marine Corps leadership on the effects of readiness policies and world events on operational readiness. This thesis uses large-scale simulation and design of experiments to methodically explore the dynamic interactions of the RAT and provide insight on the key factors, critical readiness decision thresholds and model interactions. Analysis of 1200 simulated readiness timelines highlights the critical importance of not focusing on any one aspect of readiness planning, but rather considering the interactions between force structure, deployment-demand, and force-generation-timeline decisions when developing a force-wide readiness strategy for the Marine Corps. Home-station readiness levels were found to be deficient as a stand-alone metric of success for tracking the Marine Corps’ readiness capacity to meet demand. The author used a multiple-objective analysis to better understand readiness capacity by exploring the trade-off between the level of home-station readiness maintained and the quantifying metric, risk of deploying non-ready forces.USMC Programs and Resourceshttp://archive.org/details/datafarmingthema1094562851Outstanding ThesisMajor, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited