Author Description

The end of the cold war has allowed the United States to significantly reduce defense spending. Spending has been reduced for both the force structure (i.e., equipment and manpower) and the military support base (i. e., infrastructure), but infrastructure reductions continue to lag force structure reductions. The United States Navy's recent initiatives to reduce its shore infrastructure costs include "regionalization", "outsourcing," and "homebasing." While regionalization and outsourcing decrease the number of jobs needed on a shore installation, homebasing generally increases the number of available personnel. These opposing effects require careful implementation. This thesis develops the Regionalization and Outsourcing Optimization Model (ROOM), an integer linear program that identifies an optimal combination of regionalization and outsourcing options for a Navy shore installation with personnel altered by homebasing. A ROOM test case uses actual data from the Pearl Harbor Naval Installation with proposed homebasing and regionalization and outsourcing options for 109 "functions," or shore installation activities. Disregarding homebasing and its opposing effects, regionalization is the lowest cost option for 106 of these functions. ROOM's optimal solution, however, recommends regionalizing only 21 functions, outsourcing 14, and leaving 74 unchanged. This solution yields a first-year savings of $9.5 million.