US Air Force Trains for Long-Term Goals

Air Education and Training Command maximizes resources with SAS^®

Each year, the US Air Force trains and educates more than 400,000 troops in hundreds of different career fields. Providing everything from flight school and graduate education to basic training and distance learning, the Air Education and Training Command (AETC) is responsible for replenishing the Air Force with trained and motivated personnel.

But how does the AETC balance the military’s evolving training needs with budgetary and resource constraints? With SAS. Using SAS, the command's Studies and Analysis Squadron can instantly evaluate the long-term impact of any training or curriculum change and predict resource requirements for more than five years into the future.

SAS backs AETC think tank
If the Department of Defense (DoD) needs to know the resource requirements for an altered training schedule or if Congress wants to understand the widespread effects of a particular budget cut, they contact the AETC’s Command Studies Flight. "We’re the command think tank," says Capt. Chris Chocolaad, AETC Command Studies Flight commander. "Senior leaders bring their what-if questions to us, and we use analytics to provide answers that enhance command decision making."

With SAS, AETC's Command Studies Flight can develop impact statements for more than 400 courses and 100 skill levels, breaking down results by cost, capacity, readiness and skill. Using SAS to balance goals against limitations, the Command Studies Flight can answer questions such as:

• What would it take to send 25 more combat controllers through training this year?
• Would it be possible to add one more week of training to Squadron Officer School?
• Are professional continuing-education courses giving noncommissioned officers the skills they need to do their jobs?
• How might increased training requirements for medical skills affect troops in the field? 

Minimizing cost, maximizing resources
According to Chocolaad, these questions translate into big, linear problems with hundreds of variables that affect one another in many different ways. His analyses consider data from various planning and management systems and from sophisticated evaluations that consider resource requirements for each 15-minute block of training time for thousands of courses. Moreover, for every student that attends an AETC course, there are at least 250 variables that will affect their training outcome, including facility descriptions, class size, course length and student demographics. But sophisticated analytic solutions from SAS make it easy to determine the best use of resources to reach objectives.

"We’re trying to solve the problem of how to minimize the cost of training while still accomplishing all of our training goals," explains Chocolaad. The big question, he says, is this: "Given that we will always be resource-constrained, how can we maximize our training resources and, at the same time, minimize the negative impacts of training on the rest of the Air Force?"

To illustrate this point, the Command Studies Flight helped examine the potential effect of augmenting the Air Force with as many as 20,000 additional troops – something that Congress and the DoD both have considered since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What they found was surprising. "In the short term, an increase of that size would actually be detrimental," says Chocolaad. Hundreds of skilled airmen would have to be pulled from front-line units to help train the new recruits. Then, once the recruits were trained and placed into operational units, the Air Force operational units would need to devote additional time to on-the-job training. Hitting the right balance between experienced and new airmen is essential.

With SAS analytics, the Command Studies Flight can articulate the mission impact of this or any other change, and it can show how that change will affect everyone from the military training instructors to the mess hall staff. "Our decisions impact the Air Force as a whole," Chocolaad says.

Fast, powerful analyses
Overall, the Command Studies Flight recognizes that SAS is an analytical solution that combines essential modeling, optimization and scheduling capabilities in an integrated and adaptable environment.

"We really needed a solution that could handle multiple types of analyses," Chocolaad says. "We use everything from logistic regression and linear programming to decision-tree analyses and neural networks, so being able to leverage an analytical toolkit across all the different problems that we consider is a time saver."

In fact, the Command Studies Flight is currently demonstrating its ability to provide answers quickly to Congress, the DoD and the Air Staff, Chocolaad says: "Having the analytical capability to answer even the really hard questions in a few hours versus a few weeks is a huge innovation."

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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