Research for MANPOWER

We investigated the personnel inventory that would be necessary to meet the Navy’s manpower requirements for the 313-ship Navy. We find that at any time over the 30-year shipbuilding plan, the Service’s immediate manpower requirements could be satisfied with an endstrength of only 322,000. However, we estimated that the Service’s minimum viable long-term personnel inventory will be between 332,000 and 334,000. One reason for the higher long-term requirements is that the Navy will have to add about 3,500 enlisted shore billets to maintain reasonable sea/shore flows for all ratings. Another reason is that the Service will need to add about 2,000 enlisted billets to support a viable “agricultural tail”-the base of the personnel pyramid that is necessary to grow the Service’s more senior enlisted ranks. In addition, we believe that the Navy’s current manpower requirement plans are based on an overly optimistic assessment of the Service’s ability to cut billets from the shore establishment; we expect that a more realistic assessment adds about 2,000 Sailors to the minimum viable personnel inventory. Finally, several changes in the fleet plan that are being considered will increase manpower requirements by a few thousand.

The large size and cost of the Navy’s shore establishment make it imperative that the Navy have an effective and efficient shore man¬power requirements determination process (SMRDP). Such an SMRDP implies having both the right number and right mix of shore personnel. N12 asked CNA to develop recommendations for how to make the Navy’s SMRDP more effective and efficient. The Navy’s current SMRDP has several serious problems, including poor management oversight and lack of accountability, little to no standardization between (and possibly within) Budget Submitting Offices (BSOs), unqualified staff with major roles in SMRDP, overstaffing and staffing with incorrect personnel, and failure to give good incentives to BSOs. In this study, CNA developed several recommendations, including: building a set of SMRDP guidelines for all BSOs to follow, not applying the sea requirements process to shore require¬ments, making all “Rotation” and “Career Progression” billets subject to cost analysis and review, taking a harder look at all billets ineligible for competition by tra¬dition or DoD decision, aligning incentives of BSOs and Navy for use of military manpower, using activity-based costing or similar methodology to calculate actual (not estimated) cost of activities, and increasing training for staff involved in shore manpower requirements determination.

The Marine Corps devotes about 65 percent of its budget to personnel costs. Accurate and meaningful measures of effectiveness are needed to ensure the efficient and effective running of the manpower process and to identify possible problems. Thus, manpower performance indicators (MPIs) have been developed to measure performance to provide decision-makers with up-to-date information on a Marine Corps website. The annotated briefing describes 3 types of indicators. The first set of indicators is designed to measure stress on the force. These include rates of domestic and child abuse, divorce, desertions, suicides, attrition, and positive drug tests. They also include information on lost leave, the percentages of Marines receiving family separation allowance, and the number of Marines involved in exercise or unit training each month. The second set of indicators is for entry-level training. The indicators, by military occupational specialty, show average the length of entry-level training and the number of Marines trained in every 12-month period for the last two years. The third set of indicators is for Civilian Marines, both in the appropriated and non-appropriated workforce. These indicators allow the user to look at characteristics of the workforce (age, gender, race/ethnic background, prior military service, etc).

There is concern that requirements for the Navy’s military manpower are being developed with insufficient attention to cost. In this sense, today’s requirements may be called “fiscally uninformed.” While today’s requirements may be sufficient to accomplish the mission, it is important that they accomplish the mission at lowest cost. In this study, we describe the current manpower requirements determination process, identify why requirements are not fiscally informed, and develop ideas for more market-based, cost-informed requirements determination. We find some evidence that supports expectations of how cost incentives affect activities’ decisions. Military manpower requirements would become more fiscally informed if the people making the decisions about requirements and authorizations faced the same resource tradeoffs as the Navy. We propose two general variants of more market-based processes for military manpower requirements. In each process, end users pay for the manpower they use, and have greater financial fungibility, or the ability to exchange programmed funds in one appropriation for another. An initial step toward fiscally informed requirements would be to make prices (or programming rates) more granular by manpower type. Flexible-price mechanisms, such as auctions, would result in better prices but may be more difficult to implement.