Research for Outsourcing

At the beginning of the new century, the Navy is undergoing a series of major changes in the way it fights. Changes in the force structure have altered the demand on personnel. New technologies are revolutionizing Navy platforms and concepts of operations. Business practices have shifted some work previously done by military personnel to civilians in both the civil service and the private sector. Organizational changes for all the armed forces, first initiated with the passage of Goldwater-Nichols in 1986, have placed increasing control in the hands of the joint arena. This paper explores how and why an efficient military might include an increasing proportion of senior officers over time. The argument rests on four main pillars: force structure; technology; outsourcing; and joint, interagency, and international coordination.

The Navy is considering outsourcing some ship functions to civilians. This report focus directly on the issues related to the outsourcing of service functions aboard deploying ships and examines practical issues that arise in integrating civilians into a military working environment on board the ship. Our main interest in this effort is to get an accurate sense of the fleet's issues and concerns, particularly the sailors who will have to work with civilians, should the Navy decide to outsource. This research memorandum identifies the main issues and discusses their effect on the compatibility of a mixed crew of active duty personnel and civilians.

The purpose of this study is to help the Navy identify the costs imposed on the Navy manpower system when military billets are outsourced. In particular, this paper examines how competition will affect the Navy's ability to achieve its objectives with respect to sea-shore rotation and homebasing. It provides, by community, estimates of how different outsourcing options would affect these military manpower decisions. The paper concludes that personnel policy constraints, especially the goal of providing an adequate base of shore billets for rotation, place significant limits on the number of military billets entered into A-76 competitions. Given the magnitude of manpower constraints, the Navy has two policy options: reduce the number of military billets to be competed or loosen the number of constraints. Loosening the constraints would involve: more carefully defining sea/shore ratios, allowing some A-76 competitions with high expected savings to be completed even if exceptions must be made to personnel policy goals, examining overseas shore billets that count as sea duty as good outsourcing candidates, and reexamining some of the IBR exclusions, especially for shore-intensive ratings. DTIC AD-B239314

This paper describes two federal programs that could facilitate the Navy's efforts to recruit pretrained people as well as benefit general recruiting efforts from community colleges: the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the Tech Prep Act. It offers recommendations on how to apply these programs specifically to the Navy, in terms of the types of targeted fields of study and activities for active participation that are vital components of these federal programs. It also recommends forming partnerships to create tailor-made courses of study around training curricula that have significant civilian overlap, which could save significant training costs and enhance Navy's recruiting efforts at community colleges.