Research for Annotated Briefings

This annotated briefing summarizes the results of an investigation of perstempo levels, trends and implications conducted for the Personnel Readiness Division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This paper looks at indicators, short of personnel losses, of the impact of perstempo on enlisted personnel readiness, with the aim being to shed light on the level of perstempo that can be tolerated before the negative effects of excessive perstempo show up in declining retention rates. We found some evidence of increased dissatisfaction with military pay and military life, as well as some increases in use of family service programs that help with stress, as perstempo increases. Marines, who had the largest role in Desert Shield/Desert Storm, showed the strongest indication of stress from deployment to that environment. The report also provides charts of perstempo trends for selected occupational specialties in each of the services.

The Deputy Chief of Naval Personnel asked CNA to analyze ways to transform the size and shape of the enlisted force to better meet the Navy's future requirements at an affordable cost. This research analyzes alternatives to the existing sea pay structure that generate voluntary extensions of sea duty, reduce crew turnover, and improve retention. The briefing discusses three options: an accelerated phase-in of sea pay table, an expanded sea pay premium, and a mixture of phase-in and sea pay premium. It compares them with maintaining the existing structure of the sea pay table and simply scaling it up by the rate of inflation and also assesses their effectiveness in reducing enlisted crew turnover and increasing sea duty and retention among the enlisted sailors. An accelerated phase-in option, which generates more first-term retention and helps with sea/shore balance, is recommended.

This CNA annotated briefing (CAB) summarizes findings and recommendations for medical play in KERNEL BLITZ '97, an amphibious exercise held in June-July 1997. The project was sponsored by the CINCPACFLT Surgeon.

ISAAC (Irreducible Semi-Autonomous Adaptive Combat) is a simple multiagent-based 'toy model' of land combat design to illustrate how certain aspects of land combat can be viewed as emergent phenomena resulting from the collective, nonlinear, decentralized interactions among notional combatants. ISAAC takes a bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, vice the more traditional top-down, reductionist approach, and represents a first step toward developing a complex systems theoretic analyst's toolbox for identifying, exploring, and possibly exploiting emergent collective patterns of behavior on the battlefield. This model was developed as part of a recently completed project, sponsored by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, that assessed the general applicability of 'complex systems theory.' The focus of this brief is a stand-alone Mission-Fitness Landscape Mapper that uses the core engine to 'map-out' the behavior over a user-defined d-dimensional slice of ISAAC's total N-dimensional phase-space.