Detailed Information on the
Military Force Management Assessment

Improving and integrating its pay and personnel systems, and including reserve systems.

Developing additional evaluation measures to rate the efficiency of bonus and other programs, rather than just their effectiveness.

The President directed the SECDEF, as his Executive Agent, to conduct the Tenth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC) to "review the principles and concepts of the (military) compensation system" focusing on specific areas. Using the Defense Advisory Commission on Military Compensation (DACMC) report as a point of departure, the QRMC will evaluate, among other things, the recommendations of the DACMC and recommend legislation and policy for implementing changes to the military compensation system for those which show the most promise for improving on the recruiting and retention of our service members

Evaluating the entire military personnel compensation package, rather than making piecemeal recommendations.

Measure: End-of-Quarter Strength Achievement

Explanation:Services are required to meet +/- established tolerance, e.g., 3%, strength levels as prescribed by SecDef at the end of the first three quarters of each fiscal year. Personnel categories include AC, RC (Sel Res), AGR, Dual Status MilTech, Non-dual Status Tech.

Measure: Efficient force structure mix - percent of military force structure rebalanced as planned to achieve a more efficient force. Will be applied to both individual and unit formations

Explanation:Compare the number of military spaces planned/programmed for rebalancing during a fiscal year against the number of military spaces actually rebalanced as the unit of measure.

Measure: Active Duty End-Strength - percentage of manning goal achieved

Explanation:% of authorized strength at end of fiscal year

Measure: Active Duty Recruiting - yearly percentage of required accessions achieved

Explanation:Enlisted (NPS/PS) accessions to Active Duty, % of mission

Measure: Reserve End-Strength

Explanation:% of authorized strength at end of fiscal year

Measure: Active Duty Recruiting - Quality

Explanation:% HSDG (Tier 1), % Cat I-IIIA in enlisted accessions to Active Duty

Measure: Reserve Recruiting - Quality

Explanation:% HSDG (Tier 1), % Cat I-IIIA in enlisted accessions to National Guard and Reserve

Is the program purpose clear?

Explanation: The purpose of military force management is to provide requisite military manpower to execute National Military Strategy (NMS). This requires recruiting, compensating, and retaining both active and reserve components to conduct prompt, sustained combat operations on land, in the air, and at sea per direction from the National Command Authority, plus transitioning those personnel upon separation/retirement into reserve force/civilian life.

Evidence: A basic tenet of an all-volunteer force is rewarding those who serve with financial incentives and payment in recognition of their service and the potential hazards of that service. Also, the Department of Defense Personnel & Readiness Strategic Plan 2001-2006, pg 2 notes the requirement to "Attract, retain, and motivate a high quality, diverse, and sufficiently sized force to meet mission requirements." Similarly, the purpose of the Reserve Components can be found at 10 USC 10102.

Does the program address a specific and existing problem, interest, or need?

Explanation: The US military has a continuing need to replenish its force due to retirements and separations. Changes in military roles and missions also require continuing force management, as do changes in the national economy.

Evidence: There is significant competition from colleges and other employment opportunities for young adults as well as significant monetary incentives outside the military for more experienced military members. Adequate compensation is critical to retain personnel with needed skills. Both by law and policy, the Services must continually replenish and manage the human capital of the armed forces. Constraints on end strength, length of service, promotions, and other personnel management policies require the personnel life cycle to perpetuate.

Is the program designed so that it is not redundant or duplicative of any Federal, state, local or private effort?

Explanation:  

Evidence:  

Is the program design free of major flaws that would limit the program's effectiveness or efficiency?

Explanation: No major flaws identified. Force management is dynamic; therefore, the Department and Service components conduct continuous reviews of requirements based on Quadrennial Defense Report, Defense Planning Guidance, Service Long-Range Plans, Program Objective Memoranda (POM), and Budgets.

Evidence: The military services are able to recruit and retain the bulk of their requirements. Even in bad years, the shortages are not insurmountable and the critical needs of the military have always been filled with active duty manpower or activated reservists. Continuous monitoring/improvement processes are in place (e.g. Balanced Scorecard, Unified Legislation and Budgeting Process) to respond to issues as they arise.

Is the program effectively targeted, so program resources reach intended beneficiaries and/or otherwise address the program's purpose directly?

Explanation: DoD and Service components carefully structure compensation and benefit programs to ensure that military manpower meets the required force profile.

Evidence: Military compensation is designed to foster and maintain the concept of the profession of arms as a dignified, respected, sought after, and honorable career. Special and incentive pays are specifically targeted to meet current accession/re-enlistment requirements, either to fill priority skills, even-flow the training base, promote longer enlistment contracts, and shape the force by providing additional incentives to induce members of the armed forces to volunteer for certain career fields that would, without those incentives, experience manning shortfalls.

Does the program have a limited number of specific long-term performance measures that focus on outcomes and meaningfully reflect the purpose of the program?

Explanation: The long term outcome is force manning: DoD measures or plans tro measure it through the following measures: 1. "End"-Strength met "continuously" 2. Manpower mix (military manpower reallocation) 3. NCO grade/experience mix measure

Evidence: DoD has been able to maintain forces for all its commitments, including fighting a major engagement in Iraq, without the use of conscription. Units are sufficiently manned and able to perform their jobs, and the services are still able to maintain current operations including training, education, and other commitments, while engaged in a major war.

Does the program have ambitious targets and timeframes for its long-term measures?

Explanation: DoD wants to have the right personnel in each year group promoted and available to fill all requirements. It uses a wide variety of compensation tools designed to retain the proper number of people, with the proper skills, for the entire force. It has been able to do so successfully, using bonus and pay authorities to retain its required force and meet validated requirements.

Evidence: DoD is transforming its personnel structure to adapt to the dynamic changes in the world and warfighting. These changes require DoD to have planning and management tools that can respond to this fluid environment. It currently tracks each skill to ensure that a sufficient number of personnel are available for each field and tracks the overall numbers and retention to ensure that critical billets are filled. The general overall measure for all services, personnel readiness, is as high as it has ever been.

Does the program have a limited number of specific annual performance measures that demonstrate progress toward achieving the program's long-term measures?

Explanation: Yearly recruiting and retention goals comprise annual end strength levels which build to long term sustainment of the force. The annual goals are: (End) Strength - Active and Reserve Recruiting quantity - Active and Reserve Recruiting quality - Active and Reserve

Evidence: The long term goal is retention of military forces of sufficient quantity and quality, along with the proper mix of skills. The annual goals, which help build to the long term goals, are recruiting a sufficient number and retaining the proper personnel. These goals are not directly linked, but do create the long term environment for success.

Does the program have baselines and ambitious targets and timeframes for its annual measures?

Explanation: Recruiting and retention are constrained by Congress, as DoD must meet the personnel requirements outline in its yearly authorization bill. Internally, DoD has to keep its skill and grade mixes relatively constant in order to ensure readiness is maintained and an available pool of personnel are available to fill in in case of personnel losses or unavailability. DoD does have quality and quantity baselines for both recruiting and retention.

Evidence: Achieving 100% of their yearly goals is all that is required to effectively man the force. DoD is already achieving the quality and quantity of recruits desired. It is also retaining the quality and quantity of personnel needed, and has many tools available to ensure it meets its skill requirements. Changes are marginal, at best. Furthermore, legislative caps constrain the number of people the services can have on board.

Do all partners (including grantees, sub-grantees, contractors, cost-sharing partners, etc.) commit to and work toward the annual and/or long-term goals of the program?

Explanation:  

Evidence:  

Are independent and quality evaluations of sufficient scope and quality conducted on a regular basis or as needed to support program improvements and evaluate effectiveness and relevance to the problem, interest, or need?

Explanation: Independent evaluations of the Force Management Program are conducted as needed, typically in support of a Congressional inquiry or to provide information of concern to leadership or other interested parties. These evaluations are relatively frequent and generally focused on particular sub-programs.

Evidence: The General Accounting Office, Congressional Research Service, DoD Inspector General, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense review parts of this program each year. RAND corporation initiates and publishes many studies each year on various aspects of Defense compensation and personnel management policy. Congress directs the Department to do studies each year and the Department submits a large legislative program to address issues raised during these reviews.

Are Budget requests explicitly tied to accomplishment of the annual and long-term performance goals, and are the resource needs presented in a complete and transparent manner in the program's budget?

Explanation: Consistent with the Planning, Programming, Budget and Execution System, Service budget submissions support the five-year manpower and personnel programs. Compensation programs are scrutinized both internally and externally during various budget cycles throughout the year.

Evidence: The majority of personnel costs are, in effect, fixed. The only way to achieve significant savings is reducing end-strength, a task not easily acccomplished due to mission requirements and legislative impediments. Funding is viewed as though it were a must-pay bill, and it is difficult to achieve significant economies, short of reductions in benefits or differentiation of benefit structures, both of which are diificult to achieve. Since only small amounts of compensation are not set by statute and thus are discretionary, it is hard to use compensation programs to affect budget policy, except at the margins.

Has the program taken meaningful steps to correct its strategic planning deficiencies?

Explanation: Processes are already in place to pre-emptively identify issues and take corrective action.

Evidence: Every year, a package of 100 or more personnel-related legislative proposals is forwarded to OMB and later Congress for review. This package addresses situations which arise due to conflicting entitlements or problems in current law. Among the continuing assessments are the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution process, the Military Human Resources Strategic Plan, the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation, the Annual Defense Reports, and the Defense Manpower Requirements Report.

Does the agency regularly collect timely and credible performance information, including information from key program partners, and use it to manage the program and improve performance?

Explanation: Strength, recruiting, attrition, retention, and other force management measures are reported monthly.

Evidence: Updated manpower data are collected and archived by Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and Washington Headquarters Services. Relevant data are then retrieved and reported, both for recurring tracking purposes and for ad hoc analytical queries. Most data series appear monthly, allowing the military services to respond to emerging needs. For example, after 9/11, all the services needed more security forces, so bonus funding and recruiter efforts flowed toward that specialty to ensure enough recruits were brought in to fill the school.

Are Federal managers and program partners (grantees, subgrantees, contractors, cost-sharing partners, etc.) held accountable for cost, schedule and performance results?

Explanation: Performance measures and other topics are reported to the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (USD P&R) regularly (normally quarterly) in the Balanced Scorecard and Monitoring the Status of the Force briefings. Regularly scheduled (normally weekly) meetings with Service Assistant Secretaries for Manpower and Reserve Affairs and uniformed personnel chiefs and Senior Leader Review Group are forums for Services to share information and be accountable for their performance.

Evidence: Managers responsible for Military Force Management are held accountable for their performance results. For example, recruiters, trainers and commanding officers are held accountable in reviews. In addition, advertising agencies generally provide service based a performance based contract directly tied to recruiter production. However, while performance goals are measured closely, the efficiency of the programs is less apparent. Thus, efficiency rankings are largely unavailable for the purposed of making specific budget tradeoffs.

Are all funds (Federal and partners') obligated in a timely manner and spent for the intended purpose?

Explanation: Budgets are generally executed without problem. Congressional delays in approving budget can be problematic, as can Congressional restrictions on thresholds for reprogramming.

Evidence: Although there are localized issues with pay and reimbursements, DoD surveys show general satisfaction with pay and benefits processing. Much of the funding involves pay, and problems are dealt with quickly.

Does the program have procedures (e.g., competitive sourcing/cost comparisons, IT improvements, approporaite incentives) to measure and achieve efficiencies and cost effectiveness in program execution?

Explanation: The goal of the program is manning the force in order to meet operational requirements; efficiency and cost effectiveness are not the primary considerations. Status of Forces Surveys provide leading indicators of potential issues for early remediation. Special and incentive pays are very cost effective tools for improving retention (proactive approaches are more cost-effective than reactive approaches).

Evidence: None of the programs are implemented under controlled conditions. For example, pilots may get not only an increase in basic pay, but also accelerated buydown of their housing costs, while at the same time legislation is being proposed to increase aviator-specific pays. The effects of other changes are not adequately considered when community or skill-specific improvements are being proposed.

Does the program collaborate and coordinate effectively with related programs?

Explanation: DoD collaborates and coordinates with programs within several other departments of the federal government. DoD is a large provider of health care and education, a large property owner and manager, and deals with significant environmental issues. It also maintains personnel all over the world, either in standalone facilities or with other government agencies like the State Department, the CIA, and the NSA. It also maintains relationships with State and territorial National Guard units and provides significant community support throughout the country and overseas. It works in concert with the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Veterans' Affairs to share personnel data.

Evidence: DoD works with many other agencies on issues relating to personnel managment. It interfaces with The Department of Homland Security on Coast Guard issues; Department of Labor - collaboration/cooperation in unemployment compensation, workers compensation; Department of Veterans Affairs - cooperation/collaberation on Servicemembers Group Life Insurance, Dependents Indemnity Compensation, educational benefits; Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS): dedicated BCIS processing support of DoD applications for citizenship; Department of Agriculture - foodstamps, Women Infants & Children. Unfortunately, there is not an easy metric by which to judge the quality of these collaborations. However, since these are entitlement and benefits issues, most are worked out within a decent time frame by the agencies involved.

Does the program use strong financial management practices?

Explanation: DoD has not yet received clean audit opinions for its financial statements. However, strong financial management is evident in this program in the accounting procedures that pay 1.4M AC personnel twice/month (and 0.9M RC personnel monthly) with limited errors.

Evidence: Although there are localized issues with pay and reimbursements, DoD surveys show general satisfaction with pay and benefits processing.

Has the program taken meaningful steps to address its management deficiencies?

Explanation: GAO has issued several reports recently on reserve pay administration, the Selective Reenlistment bonus, information technology systems for pay and personnel, and other programs which have generally been critical of DoD management.

Evidence: DoD has generally agreed with many of GAO's finding, but has sufficient flexibility in the short term to address the problems identified and is working on longer term information technology solutions and performance metrics to better evaluate its programs.

Has the program demonstrated adequate progress in achieving its long-term outcome performance goals?

Explanation: Past performance of long-term goals shows in how the military has managed to downsize the force without compromising mission capabilities. The military is currently in the initial stages of transformation. As a result, future long-term goals are still in their infancy.

Evidence: Critical needs are filled. Current reviews indicate overages of military members in some skills but few undermanned skills. Sound business practices indicate that retention goals should be adjusted in these skills in order to reduce overages; however, the uncertainty for future commitments of our forces will require that these type of decisions be tempered and flexibility maintained to ensure force readiness is not denegrated. DoD has proposed new programs to buy out some of its longest tenured personnel in order to shape the force appropriately during this transformation. These tools would complement other efforts to allow experienced and skilled service members currently in overage skills to be retained, if qualified, in the shortage skills.

Does the program (including program partners) achieve its annual performance goals?

Explanation: End-strength has consistently been sufficient - recently above/near flex constraint because of stop loss programs to ensure sufficient personnel for current operations. Recruit quality remains strong and numeric goals are met. Retention has been strong - partially because of stop loss programs, but mostly because of aggressive Service retention programs. Target shortfalls have been few and modest in size.

Evidence: The primary annual goal is end-strength, which is a simple function of recruiting and retention. Both recruiting and retention are directly related to compensation and quality of life. Each year DoD makes additional progress on improving these programs, leading to success in achieving end-strength.

Does the program demonstrate improved efficiencies or cost effectiveness in achieving program performance goals each year?

Explanation: Special pays are justified and targeted to be cost-effective. A-76 studies have been done to examine military-to-civilain billet conversions. DoD recently conducted a comprehensive evaluation of all military personnel assigned to work outside the DoD and identified and eliminated or continue to examine those billets not working on DoD-related efforts or in tasks that required specific DoD-skills.

Evidence: Since each bonus program and special pay are separately evaluated, rather than as part of a compensation package, the analytical process provides very little relational budget planning in the DoD system. For example, in any given year, DoD might propose increasing avaiation pay, without close consideration of the size of that year's basic pay increase, reduction in out of pocket housing costs or other compensation changes. Within the special pays and incentives, there are often proposed solutions to individual problems.

Does the performance of this program compare favorably to other programs, including government, private, etc., that have similar purpose and goals?

Explanation: U.S. military force managers maintain a force that sets the international standard for operation of an all-volunteer force.

Evidence: Requests from foreign military departments--including those from the former Soviet Union--to provide instruction, training, materials on how to produce an all-volunteer, professional force, particularly a professional non-commission officer corps serve as evidence of U.S.military performance. The U.S. sets the gold standard for an all-volunteer force. There is no other pension plan in the world which offers noncontributory inflation-adjusted pensions after 20 years of service, free health care for life, including prescription drug coverage, and other benefits. While some military members are less well paid than their counterparts, there are few skill sets which are significantly undermanned or hard to retain.

Do independent and quality evaluations of this program indicate that the program is effective and achieving results?

Explanation: Operation Iraqi Freedom was the best independent evaluation of how Military Force Management is meeting its outcome goals, i.e., providing a trained and ready force with personnel of the right skills and the numbers to execute operations in support of our National Military Strategy; Continuous, ad hoc reviews of individual programs of Military Force Management are used to refine and evaluate the overall program. The Defense Science Board Task Force on Human Resources Strategy (Feb 2000), p.v.: "The United States continues to maintain a high quality force. Professional, highly trained, and well equipped, the force has performed successfully in many and varied operations during the last decade.... Even with a several fold increase in operational tempo, the force has continued to respond to U.S. interests worldwide.", p. vi.: "The task force believes that the All-Volunteer Force remains the correct vehiccle to support the nation's national security requirements."

Evidence: In addition to these organizations, military personnel policy is often reviewed in the court of public opinion, the press, politics, and other arenas.