Breaking Ranks

U.S. Commanders Need Flexible Ways to Manage Personnel

By Beth Asch and James Hosek

Beth Asch and James Hosek are senior economists at RAND.

U.S. President George W. Bush has proposed an immense realignment of American military forces around the world. The proposal — to bring home 60,000–70,000 U.S. troops from overseas bases, mostly in Germany and South Korea, and to deploy them as necessary to global trouble spots — is intended as a way to help manage military personnel to meet emerging mission needs.

But military personnel will need to be managed in bold new ways to meet emerging mission needs even without any geographic repositioning of the troops. In fact, the ongoing efforts at military transformation sought by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will require a major rethinking of personnel management and compensation, even extending to a shift in military culture.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE   TECHNICAL SERGEANT SCOTT REED   U.S. AIR FORCE

The mother of an Iraqi man taken into custody on Aug. 21, during an operation to capture those who had launched attacks against coalition forces, pleads with U.S. Army Lieutenant Jim Jack to release her son.

For the purposes of military transformation, the most crucial changes in personnel management are not geographic ones. Rather, the military personnel and compensation system must begin to produce greater variation in career paths, to allow for greater flexibility in job assignments, and to place a higher value on innovation, intelligent risk-taking, and entrepreneurship. Four tools can help personnel managers to develop the kind of troops needed for transformation:

• Performance appraisals could place greater emphasis on innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

• Awards could be given to innovators.

• More choice in duty and job assignments could be offered to service members.

• Pay raises without promotions could be offered to service members.

These changes could potentially undercut some of the strengths of the existing personnel system; namely, its visibility, stability, and equity, all of which appear to contribute to high troop morale. The challenge will be to balance the strengths of a new system with those of the old system.

“Transformation” and Its Implications for Personnel

Military transformation can be defined succinctly as follows: a commitment to innovative approaches to war fighting and to supporting war fighters. The overriding purpose is to ensure that the military has the capabilities needed to defend the United States against a spectrum of unknown or uncertain threats, ranging from weapons of mass destruction to attacks on information systems.

The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) outlined a new defense strategy that depends on transformation for success. The strategy represents a shift from the Cold War — from focusing on a specified set of threats and planning for two major, simultaneous wars — to focusing instead on the capabilities required to deter and to defend against whatever the threats might be.

Capabilities-based planning recognizes that threats are unknowable beforehand; therefore, it is advantageous to be able to select capabilities from within each service and to combine them into a joint response as needed. Thanks to advances in sensors, communications, situational awareness, precision-guided munitions, and command-and-control technology, U.S. ground, air, and sea forces can now establish a closer working rapport than ever before.

Therefore, transformation requires not only the kinds of high-quality people the military seeks today, but also stronger policies and incentives to promote flexibility, innovation, and well-calculated risk-taking among those people. Future personnel can expect to have very different kinds of careers than those of the past. Likewise, future personnel managers will need innovative and flexible ways to use and to manage personnel. A transformed military will place a premium on adaptability to emergent situations, interoperability, joint operations, rapid responsiveness, agility to capitalize on opportunities in the field, and a small logistics footprint.

All of these priorities will require a change in military culture. The values and beliefs that shape the chain-of-command environment of the military culture today will have to cede some ground to a competing emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship. Leaders will have a particularly important role in communicating the new values and in rewarding the behavior that conforms to them. Leaders can offer incentives that will promote cultural change.