CNA Analysts Contribute to New Book on Military Transformation

CNA analysts Donald Cymrot, Michael Hansen, Diana Lien and Aline Quester contributed chapters to new book on critical military personnel issues. The book is entitled, Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military Personnel System, and is published by MIT Press.

The book argues that to attract qualified and motivated volunteers, the armed forces need to offer better tangible inducements – pay, benefits, and training – to accompany such intangible rewards as pride in serving one's country. Many of the policies related to tangible rewards were established shortly after World War II and are no longer effective. Filling the Ranks presents detailed assessments of U.S. military pay and personnel policies in light of the strategic, demographic, economic, and labor realities of the future. It offers recommendations for more flexible, adaptive, and effective policies and a blueprint for achieving them.

Cymrot and Hansen's chapter, Overhauling Enlisted Careers and Compensation, discusses the necessary transformations in enlisted training, career length and assignment process that would allow the Services to meet challenges associated with increased educational aspirations, technological change, shifting demographics and civilian workforce innovations. The June 21, 2004 issue of Navy Times cited Cymrot and Hansen's analysis.

Lien and Quester's chapter, Developing Tools to Assess Future Choices, presents a variety of approaches for evaluating military compensation and personnel policies. Approaches discussed include experimentation, focus groups, surveys, simulations, estimations using historical data and pilot programs.

The book is available from MIT at www.mitpress.mit.edu.