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Reductions in defense expenditure require holistic and coordinated planning of two critical and interconnected defense capabilities, namely a fleet of assets and the workforce required. In this paper, we model and solve a joint problem of strategic workforce planning and fleet renewal in a military context. The joint problem studied involves addressing a trade-off among several costs (e.g., workforce, maintenance, operating, etc.) and operational readiness (availability) of the fleet. To make such trade-offs, the decisions associated with workforce planning (i.e., the recruitment and the career progression of the workforce) and fleet renewal (i.e., the timing of asset replacements) strategies have to be simultaneously considered and optimized. We develop a simulation-optimization approach by coupling a system dynamics (SD) simulation model and a genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the joint problem. In the developed …