Reconstitution Costs of Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment Due to Contingency Operations

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States Navy has been involved in many peacekeeping and disaster relief operations worldwide. Most of these Operations Other Than War (OOTW) have been unanticipated and therefore unbudgeted. The marked increase in the occurrence of these contingency operations compelled Congress to establish the Overseas Contingency Operations Transfer Fund (OCOTF) in 1997. This fund is used to reimburse the service components for their expenditures in support of contingency operations. However, due to the uncertainty involved in these contingencies, the Department of the Navy (DoN) has found it very difficult to estimate and subsequently identify costs associated with the contingency operations. This thesis develops a defendable method of assigning Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment (ALRE) maintenance and repair costs to contingency operations based on the number of sorties flown. The model was derived through regression analysis of catapult shots using underway days and Primary Mission Readiness (PMR) as explanatory variables. This model should aid the DoN in both predicting and identifying costs attributable to contingency operations and lend credibility to the DoN's request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for reimbursement.Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'Reconstitution Costs of Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment Due to Contingency Operations', published 2001 under ISBN 9781423527725 and ISBN 1423527720.