Evaluating Aircraft Requirements in the Light of Varying or Uncertain Mission Mixes

It is often assumed that an extreme sacrifice in efficiency is made when utility or multi-purpose weapons systems are substituted for systems specifically designed to meet a particular requirement. In this paper the authors attempt to quantify the expected differences in the costs of providing a capability with either specialized or utility type aircraft to meet aircraft requirements in a counterinsurgency environment, where requirements are either uncertain or are known to change from time to time. Because little is known about the actual costs of aircraft operation in a primitive logistics environment, particularly the question of the difference in logistics costs as a result of operating more than one type of aircraft rather than only one type of aircraft, the analysis deals solely with average costs. Unless significant savings are likely to be achieved by providing a mix of specialized aircraft for a given level of operational requirements, an a priori case is considered made for the procurement of the utility aircraft.