Developing operations research practitioners: United States Air Force Academy operations research program

Abstract

The success of the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in graduating effective operations research (OR) practitioners, as supported by its award of the 2017 INFORMS UPS George D. Smith Prize, rests upon a close relationship with the primary customer that graduates serve. The USAFA mission is “To educate, train and inspire men and women to become officers of character motivated to lead the United States Air Force in service to our Nation.” Although the Air Force is USAFA’s primary customer, the Air Force Analytic Community (AFAC), which oversees a corps of approximately 1,100 military and civilian analysts stationed across the globe, is the USAFA OR program’s primary customer. Although not all USAFA OR graduates become OR analysts in the Air Force and not all OR analysts in the Air Force are USAFA OR graduates, the focus of the program is to produce high-performing OR analysts for the AFAC. This paper describes the four practical components of the USAFA OR program, which explain how the program has been tailored to meet the needs of the AFAC by producing good practitioners of OR for the Air Force. We conclude by explaining how these components may be generalized for a typical OR program at a college or university.