Supporting Air and Space Expeditionary Forces: Analysis of Maintenance Forward Support Location Operations

Since 1990, the United States military has been called upon to support crises that range from Operation Desert Storm to humanitarian relief operations. These operations create a diverse and unpredictable set of sortie-generation needs, from air-to-ground combat to the transport of food and supplies. To meet these demands, the Air Force is reorganizing into an Air and Space Expeditionary Force (AEF). Behind this new vision of force management is the idea that forces able to deploy quickly and frequently from the continental United States can replace the permanent forward presence of airpower that the Air Force employed during the Cold War. However, deploying airpower quickly and frequently strains the Air Force's current combat support system. The original concept of the AEF called for deploying the entire combat and support infrastructure from the continental United States. However, the resources needed to support a combat deployment are heavy, and require significant airlift and time to move to the theater. Furthermore, the need to redeploy the entire support structure with each combat deployment limits flexibility and creates instability among personnel. The Air Force is consequently reexamining its support infrastructure to focus on new goals: faster deployment, reduction in the mass of materiel to move, increased flexibility, and greater personnel stability. This study examines one potential reconfiguration of the Air Force's current support system: the creation of maintenance Forward Support Locations (FSLs) to consolidate intermediate maintenance near, but not in, the theater of operations.