Summary

A study of the Marine Corps manpower requirement procedures for base support activities focused on the development and use of staffing standards for the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany, Georgia, and the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Manpower decisions were based on survey team reviews of support manpower needs at each installation every three years. The teams relied heavily on historical staffing patterns and a subjective review of installation work centers, coupled with the Marine Corps Personnel Requirements Criteria Manual. Although Marine Corps headquarters prepared and updated the manual, the installations visited made little use of its quantitative and qualitative information for identifying staffing requirements. Installations differed in the extent to which they established their own guidelines for staff allocation. GAO expressed concern that the Marine Corps' failure to quantify its support manpower needs in relation to its workload, general weaknesses in its decentralized management approach, and inadequate manpower surveys, resulted in an absence of data critical for validating the current budget, reduced the Marine Corps' ability to manage and assess the effectiveness of its manpower, and limited its ability to determine mobilization needs in an emergency.