Sizing the US destroyer fleet

For the US Navy to be successful, it must make good investments in combatant ships. Historically a vital component in these decisions is expert opinion, This paper illustrates that the use of quantitative methods in conjunction with expert opinion can add considerable insight. We use the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to gather expert opinions. Then, distributions are derived based on these expert opinions, and integrated into a mixed integer programming model to derive a distribution for the "effectiveness" of a fleet with a particular mix of ships. These ideas are applied to the planning scenario for the 2015 conflict on the Korean Peninsula, one of the two key scenarios that the Department of Defense uses for planning. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.