IMPROVING USSOCOM ANALYSIS TO ACCURATELY COMMUNICATE SOF'S VALUE PROPOSITION AND INFORM DOD RESOURCE ALLOCATION

United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) currently lacks sufficient analytic processes to properly capture Special Operations Forces’ (SOF) value proposition and inform the Department of Defense’s (DOD) resource allocation. This thesis aims to identify potential solutions USSOCOM can implement to improve the quality of its analytic outputs that support the annual Program Objective Memorandum (POM) submission as part of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Process. To support this, the study conducted a comparative analysis of the Army, Navy, and Air Force’s established analytic processes to determine common practices. Additionally, this study considers the specific challenges that USSOCOM faces when conducting analysis on future SOF contributions such as a shortage of analytic capacity, absence of codified analytic processes, and difficulty quantifying SOF effects. By overlaying the common analytic practices used by the services against USSOCOM specific challenges, this thesis identified potential solutions for USSOCOM to explore such as focusing analytic direction, codifying an annual analytic process to improve predictability, centralizing analytic capability, and experimenting with modeling and simulation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Defense Analysis (DA)

Grantor dc:publisher

Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Sonntag, Miles D.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Burks, Robert E.

Statement dc:rights

• This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10945/72764

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:calhoun.nps.edu:10945/72764