The US Army uses Combat Support Hospitals (CSHs)—mobile, deployable hospitals housed in tents and expandable containers—to provide surgical and trauma care close to combat action. CSHs provide the highest level of in-theater medical care available to American military personnel serving in active, deployed operations, including stabilization and surgical capabilities comparable to those in the trauma centers of major hospitals in the United States.
RAND Corporation took on a project for the Army to develop and evaluate alternative strategies for equipping the CSHs to meet their equipment and maintenance needs.Using ExtendSim to evaluate the performance of alternative equipping strategies for CSHs, the study identified a new equipment and maintenance strategy that has the potential to enable the Army to reduce the cost of equipment and maintain its CSHs at fully modernized levels, providing them with equipment that is newer and in better condition on average than what they had prior to the study.