Arlington, VA | August 3, 2026 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies announces a new entry in its Forum Paper series, From Platform Costs to Campaign Effects: Embedding Cost-Per-Effect in Force Design, by Maj Erik Schuh, USAF.

Every year, the Department of Defense/War (DOD/W) allocates resources across competing investments without a consistent way to compare their value in a campaign. As a result, defense debates continue to rely heavily on platform-level acquisition metrics that provide limited insight into how forces actually perform in combat. Although a cost-per-effect methodology was intended to address this problem, the DOD/W still lacks an analytic framework capable of applying it systematically to force structure decisions at scale.

Improving force design decisions requires shifting cost comparisons from individual platforms to campaign-level outcomes. The Pentagon needs a standardized comparative cost framework and a tiered modeling architecture that links exploratory trade-space analysis with campaign-level validation to achieve this shift. Institutionalizing a cost-per-effect framework within the defense planning process would allow senior leaders to evaluate investment trade-offs more consistently, shape the campaign scenarios used to guide force planning, and better align resourcing decisions with the national defense strategy.

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