Expandability of the 21st Century Army

The nonpolitical impediments to expanding today's Army are well understood. The first bottleneck is training, particularly advanced brigade- and division-level training. After there are sufficient trained brigades to man available equipment, the main impediment would become the ability of the industrial base to produce more equipment. The goals of this research were to develop a framework for studying expandability in the future and to use that framework to study how expandability issues might change. The framework centered on a simplified model of the expansion process and an exploratory modeling environment for parametrically wandering around among plausible futures looking for interesting regions. There were few interesting regions to be found. Said another way, today's expandability issues and impediments are likely to persist in most reasonable futures.