Research for USAF

The Military Health System (MHS) is charged with maintaining a healthy active duty force, attending to the sick and wounded in time of conflict, and sucessfully competing for and treating patients within peacetime benefit mission. The military must attract and retain high-quality health care professionals. These issues are particularly important for military health care professionals because they are costly to access and train, and they have skills that are readily interchangeable to the private sector. The TRICARE Management Agency (TMA) asked the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) to study appropriate compensation, special pays, and bonuses for military health care professionals. CNA conducted a comparative analysis of current compensation (cash and benefits) between Army and Air Force physicians and private-sector physicians. Our analysis shows that the current military-civilian physician pay gap varies widely depending on specialty and years in service.

What are the cost and capability tradeoffs between land-based and sea-based tactical aviation? This recurring question reared its head again in 1994, when the Air Force presented certain cost data to the Commission on Roles and Missions (CORM). That data included cost estimates for F-15 and F-16 tactical fighter wings (TFWs), with each wing consisting of 72 aircraft. The Air Force also estimated costs for what it characterized as a 60-aircraft Navy carrier air wing (CVW), and the CVW's associated aircraft carrier (CV). Examination of the results has brought to light the fact that the model used to generate TFW costs and the one that produced the CVW/CV costs are quite dissimilar conceptually--the differences due largely to the treatment of indirect costs. As a potential contribution to the debate, we developed cost estimates that are directly comparable conceptually. This is a summary report. See 27 950019.00 for the complete study.