Research for SKYHAWK

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.