Optimizing Military Capital Planning

Planning United States military procurement commits a significant portion of our nation’s wealth and determines our ability to defend ourselves, our allies, and our principles over the long term. Our military pioneered and has long used mathematical optimization to unravel the distinguishing complexities of military capital planning. The succession of mathematical optimization models we present exhibits increasingly detailed features; such embellishments are always needed for real-world, long-term procurement decision models. Two case studies illustrate practical modeling tricks that are useful in helping decision makers decide how to spend about a trillion dollars.