Research for Fully Mission Capable

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Outsourcing TA-4J Maintenance: Cost and Quality Experience
July 1, 1997
Despite shrinking budgets, the U.S. military is struggling to simultaneously fund force levels, current operations, and an aggressive modernization program. Many believe the military can fund its recapitalization program if cost efficiencies can be achieved from within infrastructure budgets. One way to reduce infrastructure costs is through competition, outsourcing, and privatization. Whether the in-house (or organic) team or the private team wins the contract, the government benefits because the competition lowers costs and increases productivity. This paper examines the maintenance of the Navy's TA-4Js. The value of this analysis is that it allows us to look at a long series of performance and cost data, both for in-house and contractor maintenance. Because we have data on three contractors, we can also examine the effect of changing contractors.
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Understanding Aircraft Readiness: An Empirical Approach
March 1, 1997
In the wake of a changing defense climate, the Navy is continuing to find ways to adjust to its smaller size while maintaining its ability to respond when required. An important part of strategy is to monitor readiness during the downsizing process. The first step toward managing readiness is to understand what readiness is and why it changes over time or among units. This paper contributes to the further understanding of readiness by identifying the relationship between standard readiness measures and their determinants for Navy fighter, attack, and fighter/attack aircraft. The analysis is an extension of our earlier work on explaining the readiness of surface combatants. Our objective was to build a comprehensive database of navy fighter and attack units over time and identify readiness trends and relationships between readiness determinants and readiness measures where they exist.
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KC-130F Replacement Study
January 1, 1995
CNA was asked to help determine a cost-effective solution to the pending retirement of the KC-130F aircraft. The study was to be done in two phases. In phase I, we were to assess whether it made sense, from an economic and operational standpoint, to conduct a second Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) on the aircraft rather than procure new production KC-130s. The first SLEP, which was performed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was done mainly to correct structural defects. The tasker asked us to use the Lockheed KC-130X as the new production model. This paper reports the results of phase I.
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