CHAPTER FIVE
Reforming Promotions and Assignments
You are a US Navy fixed-wing attack squadron commander. Your squadron includes roughly 250 personnel, including one other commander (O-5) who serves as the executive officer (XO), four to six lieutenant commanders (O-4s) in the department head (DH) roles, and a dozen lieutenants (O-3s). The squadron includes eighteen aviators, with scores of sailors spread across the four main departments: operations, maintenance, safety, and administration. Yet, like other commanders of military units from Army battalions, Air Force squadrons, and Navy destroyers, you have no hiring authority. You cannot hire, directly or indirectly, any of the individuals under your command.
As the commanding officer, you are most concerned about the talents, readiness, and judgment of your department heads. You can communicate desires for certain individuals to Naval Personnel Command (NPC) detailers, but by-name requests are rarely considered originating from anyone other than a flag-rank officer. A commander also has limited power of negation to discourage detailing of specific individuals. Once someone is slotted, negation is almost impossible without creating a gap in the billet, meaning that the billet will remain unfilled for a year or more.
Imagine instead that you are a battalion commander in the Army. Here, too, you have extremely limited hiring authority, at least outside of the larger brigade. The typical battalion includes a lieutenant colonel (O-5) in command, two majors (the S-3 operations officer and the XO executive officer), ten captains, three or four dozen lieutenants, and 700 enlistees. Depending on the brigade, battalion commanders may have some say about which officers slated by Human Resources Command (HRC) to the brigade are internally assigned to their battalions. Many brigade commanders do not involve battalions in the sorting. Generally, proactive involvement by battalion commanders is rare.
This raises the question: why does this batch of majors get assigned to this brigade?
The initial slating of the two key leadership roles in the battalion—the S-3 and XO—are handled through division-level recruiting of majors from the larger Army. The majority of majors are in the process of graduating out of the Army’s mid-career leadership school—the ILE/CGSC training program at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Division G-1s and chiefs of staff travel during the year to Leavenworth before ILE graduation to recruit. For some career specialties, division representatives meet to sort and slate the majors. This process is an impressive utilization of engaging labor demand for sorting, but it has a number of flaws in practice. First, many units are not co-located geographically with Division HQ and tend to be neglected entirely. Second, many O-4s in the Army who are not at CGSC are neglected, including those at different ILE programs, which are sometimes more selective.
You may be the rare battalion commander who will proactively contact HRC to informally search for potentially strong O-4 candidates Army-wide. You might even reach out to officers directly to solicit their interest. But even that does not guarantee the by-name request will be filled by branch managers at HRC.
Captains are assigned to brigades, and members of each new crop of O-3s are doled out to battalions based on the discretion of the brigade leadership. For example, if the brigade has six open spaces for military intelligence junior officers, it will be sent six intelligence captains that cycle. Cycles occur twice per year (previously three times). Often it is clear who the superstar among the group is, but a battalion commander rarely does a background check on the others to petition for select individuals to be assigned to his unit.
The background information available on officers slated to the brigade is limited. Specifically, that means gaining commanders are able to see the assignment history, known as the Officer Record Brief (ORB), but are not able to see any performance evaluations. The consequence is that high performers can be invisible if their assignment records appear normal, whereas a toxic or erratic performer can appear superior.
Why are most commanders not proactive in searching, diligently reviewing, and requesting key staff? First, many battalion commanders are unaware of their limited authority to do so. Second, proactivity runs against the Army cultural norm, which is to accept all assigned troops as equals. Your commanding general might not like seeing you manipulating the system, and why risk his displeasure? Third, trying to manage the personnel system is a diversion of a commander’s attention from what the Army emphasizes, which is operational leadership.
The authority to fire and reshuffle individuals out of an Army unit exists but is rarely utilized. There is zero authority to reject assigned individuals and a very limited ability (rarely used) to petition against one’s assignment to a battalion. Firing or even rotating out officers who are underperforming is a career killer for them, so they are usually allowed to stay in a role for at least twelve months even when grossly incompetent.
What’s clear when we think about military assignments in detail is that there are three systems, not one, involved. The first is the manpower system defining the job requirements throughout the service. The second is the personnel system that develops and prepares individual service members to fit the required shape of the force, done by managing careers so that the right number of officers in each rank and specialty block is available at the right time. The personnel system also has the unenviable task of centrally matching individuals to vacant requirements. The third system is promotions, also centralized, overlaid on the personnel structure.
This chapter recommends a number of reforms to military promotions and assignments, first reviewing problems highlighted above in the status quo. The reforms are not intended for all ranks, however. Initial assignment out of basic training, to include occupational specialization, is beyond the scope of this review, nor have I even attempted to discern inefficiencies. Rather, the adoption of TVF principles should be focused on the middle ranks, namely E-5s through E-7s and O-3s through O-5s. I would caution that the mid-career period is where reform is most needed and that implementation will be problematic for entry-level individuals getting their first assignment. Likewise, there are carefully considered programs for senior officer selection that are more personalized. A central premise of the TVF is that personalized attention is what is lacking, and is arguably impossible to centrally manage, in the middle ranks of the larger populations in the Army, Air Force, and Navy.
Leader/Talent
The Leader/Talent matrix assessment (see chapter 1) found that job-matching and promotions are two of the weakest categories of talent management in the military (figures 5.1 and 5.2). These two categories include four and five elements, respectively, rated on a four-point scale from “always true” (+2.0) to “always false” (−2.0).
FIGURE 5.1. Job-Matching (Local Control, Efficiency, and Removal)
Source: Author’s Leader/Talent survey
FIGURE 5.2. Promotions (Merit, Differentiation, and Specialization)
Source: Author’s Leader/Talent survey
None of the nine elements were rated positively by the panel of active-duty and veteran respondents. By far, the lowest scores were for two aspects of job-matching. The lowest score was for the negligible hiring authority that unit commanders have, which is in stark contrast with nonmilitary organizations (score −1.4). The second lowest score reflects the inability of unit commanders to easily remove, relocate, or fire poorly performing employees (score −1.1). Moreover, the manpower system was assessed as not dynamic and unable to quickly redefine job requirements to reflect a fluid operating environment. These results suggest that the personnel system is not structurally designed to handle new threats and opportunities. Whatever the cause may be, the bottom-line assessment is that the military does not usually match skills with jobs very well.
Regarding promotions, the Leader/Talent assessment revealed negative scores for both the quick promotion of great talent (−0.7) and the nonpromotion of poorly performing employees (−0.8). In fact, feedback indicates that abusive officers and senior NCOs are tolerated in the armed forces. There were less negative, but still negative, scores regarding the consideration of merit in promotions as well as the ability of individuals to specialize (both −0.4). To be clear, these negative scores stand out in contrast with positive scores that respondents gave to other aspects of the military talent management. For example, in the category of development, respondents gave +0.7 to statements about the presence of great leaders in the organization and +0.7 that young leaders are given serious responsibilities. The point is that these responses are not negative across the board. Rather, the military personnel structure is particularly bad at promotions and job-matching.
Given the central importance of these functions to personnel operations, the TVF offers a wide range of recommendations. Many involve changes to the rules (and often laws) governing assignments such as “competitive categories” and “promotion zones,” but TVF also recommends the development of a true marketplace that would be a fundamental change from the centrally managed process in place today. It should be noted that the current personnel rules create a straitjacket on HR processes that yields a one-size-fits-all force shape for the four different branches, as if the Marines are optimized with the same rank pyramid and career timetables as the Air Force. Changing the rules will allow service diversity. Adopting a marketplace will enhance matching optimization (i.e., productivity), regardless of the rules.
The Roots of Personnel Inefficiency
For most of its history, the United States military was haunted by seniority. Perhaps the most extreme example came after the Civil War when a large cohort of naval officers held onto senior and even middle ranks—refusing to retire—causing a severe shortage of promotion opportunities for younger officers. Top graduates of the Naval Academy’s class of 1868 remained lieutenants for twenty-one years.103
The Army and Navy attacked this problem in different ways, first with a paid retirement for Army officers who reached thirty years of service, enacted by Congress in 1870, and later the Navy’s mandatory “plucking” (forced retirement) in the 1880s. In the Army, mandatory nondisability retirement could not be imposed on officers under the age of sixty-four. Despite these new retirement programs, there were no changes to seniority as the dominant factor in promotions until 1916, when the Navy adopted “promotion by selection” of impartial central boards. The use of selection as a policy was denounced as “scoundrelism” by many officers, reflecting a timeless concern about subjective bias and nepotism.
When Congress passed the Personnel Act of 1947, it formalized the battlefield flexibility of assigning and promoting officers based on the judgment of commanders rather than garrison seniority. That act formally gave the Army and newly created Air Force the power to promote by selection, although the selections were limited to cohorts of officers of the same age. The flip side of selection-based promotion was the mandatory retirement of officers nonselected for promotion. This was the “up-or-out” system pioneered by the Navy and extended to the Marine Corps by an act of Congress of 1925. The principle was limited to senior officers who failed to make flag rank, but it has crept down the ranks over the decades. In the aftermath of World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower testified before Congress that lockstep promotions until the grade of general officer were a serious problem.
Unfortunately, the up-or-out remedy of 1947 became a uniform straitjacket across all of the services in 1980. The enshrinement of a strict promotion timetable in the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) of 1980 pushes all officers on active duty through the same career track and pressures nearly all to retire at their moment of peak productivity. Bernard Rostker and Rand colleagues summarized the act’s effect in a 1993 report, which is equally accurate today:
The “up” portion of the “up-or-out” system provides that, in general, officers move through the system in “cohorts” originally determined by the year of commissioning, and compete for promotion to the next higher grade against other members of the group at set years-of-service (YOS) points. The “out” portion of the “up-or-out” system provides that “officers twice passed over for promotion, after a certain number of years, depending upon their particular grade, are to be separated from active service, and if eligible retired.”104
The great irony of the effort to cure the armed forces of its seniority problem is that “selection” became so formalized that seniority has been cemented into a lawfully mandatory rigid promotion timeline. In 2016, older officers are almost always higher ranked than younger ones, just as in 1866. The only difference is that the mass of officers are constantly churning up the ranks instead of stagnant in rank.
The standard retirement at twenty years of service and mandatory retirement at thirty years of service have a perverse incentive that overwhelms the small benefit of removing a minority of stagnant senior officers. The reality is that almost nobody has enough time at flag rank to become stagnant. They are competent, but a longer tenure would allow all flag officers to become far more proficient. Under TVF, the mandatory retirement age would be pushed back to forty years of service right away, and possibly later per service secretary discretion.
Pushing back the mandatory retirement age to forty years of service, and also changing retirement programs to eliminate the incentive to separate at twenty years for highly productive mid-rank service members, would sharply reduce the number of annual accessions. Increasing average time in service by half would reduce the number of accessions by a third, reduce training costs by a third, and potentially increase the operations-to-training ratio as well. The military would get more productive human capital at a lower cost.
Promotions and Timetables
The armed forces handle promotions in a way that must seem peculiar compared to other organizations. Promotion up to the rank of O-3 is largely automatic. Indeed, the promotion timelines are so rigid that the career trajectories of most officers look identical to most outsiders. This is driven by DOPMA’s promotion timetable, the practical effect of which is shown in table 5.1.
DOPMA’s “up-or-out” principle is so rigid that every branch of the armed forces promotes officers on the exact same timeline for the first ten or more years of service, and roughly the same for the second decade. The law allows service secretaries to extend but not reduce time-in-grade requirements for ranks O-3 and above.105 It does this in order to make sure that officers get at least two opportunities for promotion board consideration.
In most organizations, an individual who is hired to fill a job is simultaneously promoted to the rank affiliated with the job. Because the military long ago cleaved the two, the complexity of conducting promotions followed by assignments has few outside comparisons. Getting a promotion does not mean you are getting a new job, and vice versa. Rarely does an officer’s change in rank coincide with a new role. Indeed, pinning on a higher rank usually occurs while in one’s current job.
The carefully orchestrated three-phase process is meant to maximize a theoretical fairness among all officers during every step while maximizing the needs of the military. Promotions occur first. Screening for job types (including command roles) comes second. Job-matching comes third. In retrospect, the actual “promotion” in rank really serves as a necessary qualifying step for future roles.
Officially, this is how promotions work for officers below flag rank.106 A selection board committee convenes at the request of a service secretary, with the president’s approval.107 After approval, the secretary will compile a list of active-duty officers eligible for promotion to the next grade in each competitive category. The board’s objective is to screen all officers on the list and rank-order them from top to bottom.
The secretary of defense determines what information may be provided to the selection board. To begin, the board is given a list of the needs of the force: particular skills, the minimum and maximum officers needed for competitive categories, and whether any officers have the needed skill sets.
Board members are given a copy of the officer’s official military personnel record. A military personnel record includes very basic information, such as date and type of enlistment/appointment, duty stations and assignments, training, qualifications, performance, awards and decorations received, disciplinary actions, insurance, emergency data, and administrative remarks. Officers can submit comments to the board regarding the information. In addition, officers eligible for promotion are allowed to write a letter directly to the selection committee regarding their promotion. The letter must be under ten pages and meet the requirements of the selection committee. If the letter (or its attachments) do not meet the requirements, then it will not be shown to the board. Surprisingly, attachments that accompany the letter may not include recommendations, previous assignments, or education.108
The promotion board process famously allows each board member to view each individual “packet” for one minute and make an independent score. Scores are tallied and the list is generated. The final rank-ordered list is secret. The names of those selected for promotion are published in a list by order of seniority, and promotions are made “in the order in which the names of officers appear on the promotion list” using pin-on dates.109
In the Air Force, promotion to O-4 (major) slightly varies the timing such that some sliver of a year group (named after the year of commissioning) makes major a year before the main cohort, known as “below the zone.” Half the year group is promoted a year later “in the zone,” and then a distinct minority are promoted “above the zone.” During 2014, for example, 86 percent of USAF officers in the 2005 year group were captains compared to only 30 percent of the older 2004 year group. This pattern reveals the annual bifurcation during which half of a year group is promoted simultaneously after ten years in uniform.
Naturally, the few officers not selected for promotion in the zone are known by all to be of a lesser class. Oddly, the list itself is kept secret, so no one knows the relative merit among those who are not promoted. Actual promotions are given out in order of “pin-on” dates, and the top 20 percent of selected individuals are designated as “school selects,” but the handful of officers who just miss the cut are indistinguishable from the others (and ignorant of their relative status). The rank-ordering is valuable information, yet it is not utilized ever again—not by future commanders, future promotion boards, or the individuals in question. Indeed, a tremendous amount of valuable personnel information like this is expunged.
The laws governing promotions, notably DOPMA constraints, should be revised to allow service flexibility so that the chief of staff of the Army, commandant of the Marine Corps, chief of Naval Operations, and chief of staff of the Air Force can establish promotion rules that are best for their men and women. Even if the Army prefers to maintain the rigid timeline, the Navy would be allowed to loosen its up-or-out timeline, while the Air Force would be able to end the use of year group promotion zones entirely.
Mandatory promotion zones hinder the optimization of job-matching and specialization. The universal timetable requires the force shape of each service to look just like the others. However, it would not be useful to replace the DOPMA mandate with an alternative timetable mandate. Rather, each service should be allowed the flexibility to regularly reform its force shape and promotion timetable. That means the commandant of the Marine Corps could even continue using the DOPMA promotion zones.
If Congress does not amend DOPMA’s timelines, it should at a minimum loosen the rigidity of the promotion zones by offering service chiefs flexibility on the issue. Each service should have expansive authority to use below-the-zone promotions for up to 40 percent of its officers in each cohort (double the maximum allowed of 20 percent).
The Air Force and, to a lesser extent, the Army use below-the-zone (BTZ) promotions in ways the Navy and Marines do not. The use of BTZ offers advantages in identifying strong, young leaders for promotion, but it has downsides in light of the other rigidities. One disadvantage is the “halo effect” that separates BTZ officers from others by offering better assignments, greater opportunities, and a continuation of special treatment, all based on the first early promotion. It’s not that the BTZ process itself is flawed, rather that in-the-zone officers feel (and often are) permanently behind and are unable to catch up. This leaves little room for late bloomers or those circumstantially noncompetitive due to assignment timing. Oddly, BTZ officers also often find themselves at a disadvantage during slating when they are the lowest ranked individual in a cohort selected for command, often getting the least desirable job on the slating list. While the BTZ concept is not broken, its flaws could be remedied by scrapping the year group structure entirely. In the more open TVF structure, the idea of year groups would no longer be a factor in promotions or assignments. But this is because DOPMA requires nonpromoted individuals to be forcibly retired, which TVF would eliminate. The only service members required to be forcibly retired in the TVF will be those who are unable to find an active-duty job.
In order to control for dominance of any one category of officers in promotions (e.g., pilots in the Air Force), the law allows each service to establish competitive categories. Officers in the same competitive category compete among themselves for promotion. In the Air Force, only a few categories (medical corps, chaplains, judge advocates) are used outside of the main line. In the Navy, competitive categories are established for intelligence, information warfare, and other more general functions as well as the unrestricted line. This flexibility is not as useful as it might seem—especially in light of the critical need for advanced cyber and acquisition management skills—because each category is bound by the same career straitjacket per DOPMA promotion timetables. Congress should act to give United States Cyber Command, currently headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, an exemption from DOPMA’s career structure as a unique and critical workforce. The same exemption should be granted to active-duty personnel in the acquisition workforce, plus allowances for service chiefs to define different timetables for different competitive categories.
One of the more revolutionary ideas that could improve talent management in the armed forces is to merge the assignment and promotion processes into one. This would replace the existing multistep process of promotions followed by assignments. The standard promotion boards would become purely qualification boards—designating a (larger) group of officers to be eligible for higher-ranked assignments and roles. There would be no pin-on dates for field-grade positions. Rather, the pin-on would occur simultaneously when a service member begins a job at a higher rank. Similarly, each service should have the power to make brevet promotions, a common practice in the Army dating back to 1776 that allows individuals to wear the rank affiliated with their current assignment and then return to their permanent rank afterward. While such a step is recommended, it is also unlikely in the short term, and it is not necessary to implement any of the other recommendations either.
Aiming High: Case Study in Choosing Commanders in Today’s Air Force
Every autumn, the Air Force prepares a list of officers selected for squadron command. While taking command of a squadron is a momentous achievement in its own right, it is also the vital stepping-stone to future leadership roles. Management of the command selection process is similar in many ways to the promotion process, driven by a board of carefully chosen senior officers from all around the world tasked with using the fairest means to first create a list of individuals who are qualified to take command. Next is a slating process that selects from that list those individuals who are actually given specific jobs. The 2015 results were published in the following Air Force Times article:
The Air Force has picked 514 officers for a variety of squadron command posts in 2016, the Air Force Personnel Center said Tuesday. The officers—who range in rank from captains to lieutenant colonels—will command logistics, support, materiel leader, air base, training, recruiting, test or medical squadrons, AFPC said. Wing hiring officials, major command functional managers and AFPC assignment teams matched officers from a list of potential candidates—which was released in September—to projected command positions. The assignment teams will have to coordinate with the units that are losing and gaining the new squadron commanders to decide what date the officers will report to their new assignments. Officials chose 17 captains, 153 majors and major-selects, and 344 lieutenant colonels and lieutenant colonel-selects. The development teams to choose squadron commander candidates began considering officers in May. They ended up with a list of more than 980 candidates from 29 career fields, the Air Force announced in October.110
Each major command (MAJCOM) manages its own group. For example, Phoenix Eagle is the name that Air Mobility Command uses for its command screening process, nominating a different group of mid-rank officers than those nominated by the other nine MAJCOMS. The process begins with officers of a certain rank submitting an official form letter to their MAJCOM volunteering to be candidates for command, a letter that must include language stating their acceptance of any possible assignment. Volunteering cannot be limited to certain types of units or locations, nor can any position be ruled out. Officers who are selected but subsequently turn down their assignments suffer negative career consequences, including possible forced retirement without pension. On the other hand, a qualified officer who does not “volunteer” for command is sending a dangerous signal that all but ends one’s career.
Compared to the other services, the USAF process for selecting these commanders is highly flexible, with greatly decentralized authority over individual selections. Each MAJCOM has a development team that scores all of the individuals under consideration (or, rather, scores their packets). Development teams meet two or three times per year. The actual selection is done by senior commanders—for example, a wing commander choosing the individual who will lead one of her squadrons.
For Air Mobility Command, as an example, AFPC might generate a list of 180 officers eligible for squadron command from a crop of 250 volunteers. Of the Phoenix Eagle candidates, roughly fifty will be assigned to command a squadron, but this process involves a surprising degree of decentralization. Senior officers can bid on candidate officers up for command, a process that is refereed by AFPC. Note that different specialties have widely different promotion rates; some specialties see only 20 percent of eligible candidates selected for command, whereas others are critically understaffed and see nearly 100 percent of candidates selected.
Restore Command Authority
A more advanced TVF recommendation is for service chiefs to restore authority to unit commanders over personnel functions, especially hiring. It may surprise some readers, but restored hiring authority can be implemented by any service without legislative action. The centralization of promotion boards and assignment centers occurred principally during the early 1960s under the direction of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
The inefficiencies of central planning plague military job-matching. Critics of decentralized hiring echo concerns about promotion-by-selection made a century ago. What is to stop bias and favoritism? There are concerns about sexism, racism, or good-old-boy networks. The challenge is to design a process that maximizes the efficiencies of decentralized optimization while minimizing bias. The status quo aims to be so impartially centralized that it suffers from matching inefficiencies and outright ignorance of service member preferences. Interestingly, each of the armed forces has the legal power to decentralize command authority to whatever degree it deems best while retaining rules that will prevent bias.
To prevent biased hiring, TVF makes sure command authority is not absolute. It maintains a role for central boards and branch managers—by screening which individuals are nominated for assignment to commanders (at the rank of O-5 and above)—to exercise final authority over hiring. See figure 5.3 for a look at the basic idea of job-matching in the status quo, where the commander’s function is idle, compared to the TVF, where it is active and vital. Personnel centers/commands will provide a slate of no fewer than three candidates for the unit to interview and choose for key roles. Commanders should have limited authority to directly hire, whereas most hires will be through the centrally provided slate of candidates. Many key developmental roles should still be directly assigned centrally—meaning that a single candidate shall be recommended by personnel centers in many instances (e.g., honoring follow-on assignment commitments)—but the unit commander should retain the right to veto a limited number of such assignments.
More local authority should also be granted to the labor supply side. That is, the TVF will give more career control to individuals in choosing assignments. To repeat, these reforms are not being recommended for all ranks. Rather, the TVF recommends implementation for mid-career ranks.
FIGURE 5.3. Job-Matching in the Military: Status Quo versus the Total Volunteer Force
A Individual service members who are eligible and qualified for rotational assignments APPLY to open positions listed in the online talent management system.
B Volunteers will BE SCREENED by managers at the Personnel Command/Center (PC) and three candidates will be recommended to Unit Commanders.
C COMMANDERS will interview candidates and make an offer to their top choice.
D Assignments are made DIRECTLY by managers at PC. This includes promised follow-on assignments and key development positions deemed essential for select individuals.
Source: Author
The TVF process outlined in figure 5.3 would differ from the status quo by allowing individuals to decline assignments. Instead, it would empower individuals to apply for open jobs. To thicken the labor supply, a service could be allowed (but not required) to make some jobs open to reservists and veterans. To be sure, individuals should only be able to apply for jobs for which they are qualified. This new approach to job-matching raises a question about the capacity of the existing structure to accommodate a flood of applications. How would commanders have time to sort through all of the applicants? This important question is not so daunting as it might seem, especially given the unlimited number of applications to jobs outside of the active force. A second question is how to prevent favoritism and bias in the hiring process. The answer to both questions sketched in figure 5.3 is to involve the personnel centers in winnowing the applicant list to a small number of nominees for a unit commander’s consideration.
A workable system could accommodate the technical supply of labor in many ways. Individuals could be allowed to apply for up to five (or ten, or fifteen) open jobs at a time. Alternatively, individuals could designate a handful of jobs in preferential order while also expressing willingness to accept dozens more. But couldn’t service members (and reservists and veterans) still flood the computational capacity of detailers who will be tasked with screening the applications? That is unlikely. But a simple remedy is to require individuals to prioritize their job applications using a modified “dream sheet.” One workable TVF dream sheet process involves a list the job-seeker maintains with three “top” choices, up to seven “preferred” jobs, followed by an unlimited number of “acceptable” jobs. The list could be constantly updated.
An avenue that should be encouraged is to allow individuals to query units and HR officers about open and forthcoming jobs, including potential job openings in the dream sheet. Lastly, the TVF should allow individuals to opt out of the promotion cycle in order to extend and specialize in their current roles. Likewise, individuals should be allowed to apply for open jobs at their current rank, rather than be forced to move “up” during every change of station. This would allow, for example, aviators to stay in the cockpit, cyber warriors to remain in critically understaffed positions, and combat commanders to extend their tours during wartime operations in which continuity is vital for mission success. More flexibility and cost savings will be achieved if individuals can apply “down” to lower-ranked jobs if that is their preference.
Turning back to the labor demand side, the TVF will allow commanders to make fast dismissals and emphasize quick replacement. Currently, commanders technically have the authority to remove a subordinate whose performance is subpar through a lengthy, punitive, and bureaucratic process that is rarely used due to its cumbersome nature. The services should empower commanders with a flexible array of options to include for-cause firing—but the critical missing piece is simply to allow a no-fault dismissal, an action that would not reflect negatively on the service member.
Dismissals and firings of individuals currently leave a hole in the unit—the unfilled billet problem—which penalizes commanders. This tends to keep poor job matches in place, with the appearance of a smoothly functioning organization, but it is rooted in a perverse incentive to maintain inefficient matches. The dismissal process must be fixed to allow quick replacement.
Turning lastly to the question of capacity: would a talent market described here burden the time of a unit commander and staff? Perhaps. The truth is that most corporate managers spend a much greater percentage of their time on personnel management as opposed to operations than military commanders. Indeed, corporate leaders often marvel at how disengaged military leaders are at coordinating best-fit talent. While the TVF may require more up-front costs on the commander’s time in coordinating talent, it offers unrealized gains in readiness as well as the commander’s time because it will avoid current issues with teams that are poor fits with some unit members.
Timing and the Talent Marketplace
A fundamental problem with the existing assignment processes is that it is not built for real-time job placement, which makes nimble replacement moot. The decentralized TVF assignment process described earlier could be implemented regardless of a real-time assignment norm (and with no need for legislative changes), but it would benefit from a continuous job-matching process as opposed to the current discrete process conducted two or three cycles per year.
A discrete job-matching process tries to optimize n faces against n places all at once. There are many downsides to this status quo, the biggest being that the real world does not work that way. Often, the optimal job for an individual (in terms of desire or key career progression) is not available during the current job cycle. Square pegs are placed into round holes all the time. The TVF would instead let a square peg wait until the better fit becomes available. In other words, the TVF job market will be continuously open. Any service member could log onto the online TVF talent marketplace in order to see the current list of open jobs. Once a job is filled—meaning the assignments officer has forwarded three nominees to the unit commander, whose staff has reviewed and made a selection, and orders are issued and accepted—then the job listing would be immediately removed from the marketplace.
The notion of a talent marketplace has already been piloted in the US Army’s proof-of-concept project known as Green Pages from August 2010 to August 2012. Designed to study and potentially resolve many of the dynamics discussed in this book, Green Pages was limited to officers in the Engineer Regiment. In two years, nineteen discrete iterations made 748 actual assignments. Ten iterations were for captains, seven for majors, and two for lieutenant colonels.
The pilot project was a success, but not a total success. First, it showed that a marketplace could be used to enhance rather than displace the existing role for branch managers. Second, Green Pages engaged individual officers in order to obtain a much richer profile of the skills, education, and talent already in existence. By offering a new incentive to build an attractive and accurate profile in the system, individual officers themselves entered a tremendous amount of data that was unknown by the older top-fed central system—languages spoken, countries visited, engineer certifications completed, and so on. In fact, half of the participants found at least two significant errors in the top-fed data. More to the point, the Army had never been able to incentivize profile data participation on the wide scale that Green Pages did. Third, officers expressed greater satisfaction with the outcomes (notably because participants were 34 percent more likely to get their top preference). Fourth, officers and gaining units changed their match preferences during the market phase of each Green Pages iteration. That is, each side learned more about the other—particularly when the other side expressed interest—and adjusted its preference rankings, allowing branch managers to make more optimal matches.
Efficient job-matching requires an information system that makes available jobs (requirements) visible with details about location, unit, role, commander, and more. Unfortunately, the downside of Green Pages is that units were not as active in providing details about open jobs, even though they did participate in the market operation. The after-action report on Green Pages described efforts to fix this aspect of weak demand-side information, which ultimately involved essentially haranguing unit strength managers to participate. The problem was chalked up to cultural and training biases, acknowledging that a few unit commanders did not grasp the concept or need. The fact is that many units had one or two engineers out of many other officers. The commander, regardless of participating in Green Pages, could be confident that the engineering position would be filled. In other words, there was no negative consequence for ignoring the marketplace—and there never will be a demand-side incentive in a discrete assignments process. Not so in a continuous job-matching marketplace.
Let’s step back and imagine a branch manager matching n infantry majors against n infantry requirements during a given cycle. Let’s imagine n = 100, for the sake of argument. Currently, the manager will try to optimize the match, generating 100 sets of orders on the final day of the process. An alternative would be to cream the top matches (that is, the twenty or so individuals whose top preferences and qualifications are met by being the top preference of twenty or so units) and then re-run the match, allowing individuals and units to see the remaining eighty available faces/places. Preferences would be reordered. If this process is iterated (n = 65, then n = 50, and so on until n = the last 10), then a different hundred matches will be made because more detailed preferences are revealed.
An even better process would allow a long market phase during which participants could see the preferences of the other side (demand sees supply preferences, and vice versa) and then update their own. Interviews could be conducted. Officers could e-mail questions and get answers. Each iteration of Green Pages had a market phase of two to six weeks allowing exactly this kind of back and forth, but it had a single postmarket assignment phase in which all n matches were finalized.
Currently, the US Navy is developing a web-based talent management platform called Talent Link, which builds on the concepts piloted in Green Pages. It envisions discrete job-matching cycles with three periods—discovery, evaluation, and slating—which involve profile-building, market interactions to finalize preference lists, and job offers, respectively. The Naval Personnel Command aims to run a pilot program for multiple officer communities, including surface warfare officers.
Recognizing that a continuous talent market would involve revolutionary change, the following questions arise: How does the system resolve individuals who neglect to submit a preference list or overstay their current jobs? How does the system anticipate job openings if individuals are able to overstay in their current jobs? Can individuals job-hop as often as they want? And if not, what role do losing commanders have in retaining their unit members? What happens to units if a commander selects a nominee, but the nominee rejects the match? What if this happens multiple times? What if the sweetheart jobs are only open for a few hours before being filled? All of these dilemmas will be resolved relatively smoothly in practice, but resolution may require jettisoning the discrete cycles in place now.
The TVF Job-Matching Process
The following twelve guidelines describe essential aspects of the TVF’s continuous talent marketplace:
One of the realities of the existing manpower system is that in some services there are many more unfilled requirements than available personnel. Thousands of requirements are left empty for years, and the reason is that it costs the armed forces nothing to do so. People are a cost; empty seats are not. Eliminating low-priority requirements is, however, costly in terms of time and hassle. Why bother? What manpower managers should do, and must do for a TVF transition, is to perform a thorough prioritization of existing requirements. As a default, a requirement should be considered standard-priority. Managers would have to proactively designate others as higher priorities (key experience, command track, etc.) and, as part of the review, establish the tenure points for these higher-priority jobs. Only priority jobs would qualify for pays above the basic rate (explained more fully in the next chapter).
Does the TVF require a new online marketplace? What is described above involves an online market, but many TVF reforms could be implemented without it. For example, steps (6) and (8) could be implemented today. Personnel centers should screen and nominate three individuals for unit commanders, who will make the hire. No new technology is required for this core process. What technology can do is enhance the efficiency of the process. Matching algorithms can help service members screen all available jobs in order to make sense of what otherwise could be information overload. A web-based talent-management database could expand the amount of information—as Green Pages did for Army engineers—about faces and spaces. Technology can empower service members to build more nuanced dream sheets that express their preferences. Yet as military members know too well, development of technology is slow and often yields worse outcomes due to poor implementation. That is why TVF emphasizes process reforms first, technology second. Establishing command authority is far more critical to reform than building a new master database.
Will the TVF strain the time capacity of commanders, especially if it lacks new technology? Yes and no. There is no question that giving the authority to hire to commanders rather than central planners also burdens commanders with a newfound responsibility. It is not clear this will be more than a light and productive burden, and it promises to add profoundly to unit readiness and morale, an investment of upfront time that will yield dividends in freeing up command time on operations. To avoid this capacity constraint from becoming a logjam that breaks the assignment process, reform must include well-designed defaults. Specifically, a commander who neglects to make a nominee selection within a set timeframe defers the choice back to the personnel command. The services could pilot different default timeframes and refine them going forward. The biggest mistake of all is to assume the reformed job-matching must be perfect and rigid from day one. Flexible defaults will be essential during the years of transition.