Planning by Resource Allocation Methods—Illustrated by Military Applications

This paper is concerned with resource allocation problems of a somewhat general nature. For presentation convenience, the material is stated in terms of military planning, where this planning refers to the production and use of types of weapons that have already been developed. The situation can be conveniently phrased in terms of resource allocation with respect to some specified types of weapons that are to be used to attack some given targets. Consider all combinations of target and type of weapon. The problem is to distribute the total available resources (for production and use of weapons) among these combinations in such a manner that the value of the targets surviving the attack is minimized. A deterministic model of an exceedingly flexible nature is developed for representing situations of this nature. Despite the generality allowed, an elementary iterative method is obtained for solving the allocation of resources problem. These results are computer oriented and should be feasible for application even when the model is of an exceedingly complicated nature.