Mobilizing marine corps officers

The ability to rapidly mobilize the Marine Corps in times of crisis is a cornerstone of United States defense strategy. To mobilize rapidly, the marines need an efficient system for assigning officers to mobilization billets. The system the authors designed and built is based on a network optimization algorithm that works in conjunction with carefully designed scrupulously maintained Marine Corps data bases. It takes less than 10 minutes on a 386-based personal computer to complete a mobilization involving 40000 officers and 27000 billets and to produce output suitable for generating orders to report via MAILGRAM. Prior to the present work, the Marine Corps had a mainframe-based system that took two to four days to complete a mobilization. The new system is not only much faster than the old system, but it also produces significantly better assignments with respect to all measures of effectiveness considered.