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ICAM Conceptual Design of a manpower lyfe-cycle cost model
Individual Cost Assessment Model  
Lt. Col. Todd CombsIn 2011, then-Air Force Reserve Command Commander Lt. Gen. Charles Stenner approached his A9 Directorate of Analyses, Assessments, Lessons Learned and Continuous Process Improvement with what seemed like a pretty simple question: "What is the cost of an Air Force Reservist versus an active-duty Airman?"

In a quest to answer this not-so simple question, the A9 directorate developed ICAM, a simulation tool that made it easier to analyze and compare manpower costs across the reserve and active components. ICAM provided an unprecedented capability to understand what Airmen cost, not only on an annual basis, but across the life cycle. ICAM looks ahead, assessing not only today's costs, but also future costs under different pays, compensation policies and conditions. ICAM has already proven that reserve manpower costs are about one-third annually than those of an active duty military member.

Lieutenant Colonel Todd Combs was instrumental in the development of ICAM. In his civilian career, Combs works at the Department of Energy National Lab as an expert in modeling and simulation and was able to bring that expertise over to the reserves.

AF Ops Research Symposium AwardEarly in 2015, ICAM was added to the Air Force Standard Analytical Toolkit, a foundational set of Air Force analytic community-accepted modeling and simulation tools designed to improve the consistency and quality of Air Force analyses.

For its efforts, the ICAM development team was recently recognized with an honorable mention for the 2015 Air Force Analytic Innovation Award.