Sustaining the Drone Enterprise: How Manpower Analysis Engendered Policy Reform in the United States Air Force

Abstract

The remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), colloquially labeled the “drone,” has become iconic of American military campaigns during this century. However, with surging demand for RPA combat operations, the United States Air Force (USAF) has struggled to train and retain sufficient manpower to operate these aircraft. As part of a recent effort by the Secretary of Defense to stabilize manpower trends in the USAF RPA enterprise, we developed a dynamic manpower projection model to quantify the potential impact of more than 50 policy initiatives. Ultimately, the model showed that a combination of five major policy initiatives would most efficiently and expeditiously improve manpower trends. The Air Force has already begun to implement these initiatives as part of a plan that will affect over 1,100 active-duty airmen operating a multibillion-dollar enterprise. In this paper, we discuss the background and complexity of the RPA manpower problem, the metrics that we used to evaluate the manpower system, and the modeling techniques we employed to inform a comprehensive solution to mitigate this manpower shortfall.