Ash Carter
When Army 2nd Lieutenant Joseph Riley was a senior at the University of Virginia, he ranked 10th out of 5,579 in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) National Order of Merit List. Upon graduation, he was proudly commissioned an Army officer and selected as a Rhodes Scholar to study at Oxford, where he pursued a master’s degree in international relations.
That was where the trouble began. In 2015 the Army informed Riley that, because of his time away, he was not being promoted alongside 90% of his peers to the rank of 1st lieutenant and he would soon be facing a board to determine whether he should be separated from the Army altogether. It took the intervention of Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley to save Riley. Today he continues to wear the uniform.
2nd Lieutenant Riley’s background is any employer’s dream, and his retention in the armed forces is a good thing for the Department of Defense, the organization I had the honor to lead from 2015 to 2017. But the protocols that almost led to his leaving the Army are an employer’s nightmare. When contending for talent in a competitive world, no organization — let alone the largest in the world, with the largest stakes — can afford to lose employees like 2nd Lieutenant Riley.
A case like Riley’s would make any leader take a hard look at his institution’s talent management, but it is particularly worrying at the Defense Department. When Americans reflect on what makes their military the best, it is not just its unrivaled technology, the nearly $600 billion dollars per year we spend on it, its compelling mission, or our network of global allies. America’s military is the finest fighting force the world has ever known because of the people we attract to an all-volunteer force. But the traditions and rules that have strengthened the U.S. military over the last 250 years can, at times, make recruitment and retention difficult.
That’s why, as Secretary of Defense, I took steps to transform the department’s personnel policies. Working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the individual military services, who are responsible for training and equipping personnel, we launched our “Force of the Future” initiatives to make the department more open, more flexible, and more supportive of alternative paths like 2nd Lieutenant Riley’s. But, while much progress has been made and the logic behind the initiatives is ironclad, the job of building the Force of the Future is not yet complete. What I learned, and present here, will help leaders in the Defense Department and Congress finish what we started, and I believe these lessons can help leaders in the private sector make needed changes in their talent management to keep up and stay ahead.
When I took the oath of office, in February 2015, with two years left in the Obama administration, I made a specific commitment to ensure that the U.S. military continues to be a place where America’s finest want to serve. It was clear to me then that the Defense Department would need to keep pace with the dramatic changes — many of them technological — reshaping the economy, the labor market, and human resource management.
We set out to change how the department thought about and treated talent through the full career cycle of our uniformed and civilian personnel, from their recruitment through their training, advancement, retention, and retirement.
As we dug into the challenge, it became clear that the pool of available talent from which the department can attract and recruit young Americans is shrinking quickly. The U.S. military needs at least 250,000 young people to join up every year. But of the more than 4 million men and women who turn 18 each year, a mere 29%, or about 1.2 million, are high school graduates (or have earned their GED) who meet the military’s recruitment standards and are eligible to serve. (The main barriers are obesity, drug use, and problems with the law.)
Even though the profession of arms is unique in many ways, I knew that to build the Force of the Future in a relatively successful economy, we were going to have to compete against some of America’s best employers, and so we sought to learn from them. We learned that we would need to change the way we used analytics and data and the way we managed our personnel processes. But more than that, we would need to make fundamental changes in how we attracted, developed, and advanced our talent, and how we helped the department’s people transition back to civilian life.
Attracting Talent
First, the Defense Department had to find a way to increase the pool of high-quality candidates inclined toward service. We faced geographic and awareness challenges. Nearly 40% of all active duty military recruits come from just six states. At the same time, military service has become something of a family business: Those who have joined the military are nearly twice as likely to have a parent who served. Data shows most young people are unsure — or even misinformed — about what it could mean for them to wear a uniform.
To overcome those challenges, we began to change where and how we recruited and advertised. The department started sending recruiters to the 44 states where we had fallen behind. We laid the groundwork to appeal to the influencers young people trust most — their parents and family, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, and clergy — and convince them military service is something to encourage. And we planned and budgeted to launch a new advertising and marketing campaign, which still awaits congressional approval, to employ predictive analytics and microtargeting, similar to those used in consumer marketing, to reach Americans who may not have previously considered military service.
Of course, as we sought to expand the military’s talent base, we could not afford to continue the policy of closing certain military positions to women. Taking 50% of the population off the table meant losing too much potential talent. I therefore decided to open up all combat positions to women, including infantry, armor, and some special operations units, like the Navy SEALs, without exception. Now women who meet our uncompromising standards will be measured by their contribution to the force no matter what field they choose.
The Pentagon also needed to improve the way the department attracted young officers, 40% of whom do not attend the three military academies, instead coming from our century-old, college-based ROTC program. The department found that too many talented students did not know about ROTC until they were already on campus. So the Defense Department will now offer more two- and three-year ROTC scholarships to students interested in joining after their freshman or sophomore years.
And because the Force of the Future will not all serve in uniform — 700,000 civilians do critical work across the department — we changed how we hire civilians. The Pentagon used to lose too many talented college graduates to more agile competitors, even though we were their first choice, because of the time it took to get an offer through the cumbersome bureaucracy. So Congress agreed to give the department the authorization to hire civilian employees directly through recruiting visits on college campuses. This spring, for the first time, recruiters were out there using this new authority to hire the civilians who will serve in the Department for years to come.
Developing Talent
As any employer knows, recruitment is just the first step to talent management. To develop these civilians and uniformed servicemembers, the department also needed to give its personnel more opportunities to grow. One way I sought to do so was by creating new and expanded “off-ramps” and “on-ramps” for personnel. We gave the department’s people time to work outside of the Pentagon and to bring smart, dedicated outsiders in for a time to help us think differently and imbue our staff with ideas and practices from outside the ranks.
One off-ramp is the Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellowship, which selects officers to train with a forward-thinking business or organization. In recent years, the department has sent men and women to Google and Amazon, among other tech leaders. And now the Defense Department is doubling the size of this program, opening it to enlisted leaders, and diversifying where personnel can do a tour, including other innovative state governments and not-for-profit organizations.
Promotion
Of course, the Defense Department needs to be sure that its highest performers continue to move up through the military ranks. To do so, the Pentagon proposed some important and innovative improvements, but although the U.S. Senate approved the changes, the House of Representatives has not yet enacted these necessary reforms.
The current system is governed by the 36-year-old Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, or DOPMA, which established the requirement that officers advance or be forced out. While the system has fostered a world-class officer corps for generations, this “up-or-out” system has grown too rigid for today’s young people, who want more flexibility and variety in their career paths. So we sought to improve DOPMA to ensure talented officers would not be penalized for pursuing opportunities outside of the traditional “command” track or temporarily postponing promotion consideration. These are logical changes to a system that is, in some ways, dated, and I hope Congress will enact them soon.
Retention
Retention can be a challenge as young personnel start families and have to balance those personal commitments with their commitment to service. That is especially true at the Defense Department, where 70% of the officer corps is married, compared with 45% of civilians age 25 to 34, and where military members marry and have children at younger ages than their civilian counterparts.
That is why it is said often: You recruit a servicemember, but you retain a family. We accordingly expanded paid maternity and paternity leave, we created a standard that required a mother’s room for nursing at every Defense Department facility (establishing 3,600 such rooms in the process), and we expanded the hours of daycare centers up to 14 hours a day across the force to provide military parents with greater flexibility. The costs of these changes have been more than offset by higher retention of expensively trained personnel. We also found that we could increase retention by allowing family members to stay longer at a duty station of choice, in exchange for an additional service obligation.
Separation and Retirement
Finally, the Defense Department modernized its retirement system. It’s the right thing to do for any number of reasons, but in this context it’s actually an important recruitment tool. I remember when veterans were treated poorly, and in my time at the department we recommitted ourselves to helping them transition to veteran status when they move on, so that they can succeed in every way possible. We provided new career counseling as well as professional skill certification for our tradesmen, among other efforts. And employers around the country now sing the praises of their veteran employees. The Pentagon also improved servicemember retirement benefits. The department now offers a portable, 401(k)-like plan that personnel can take with them when they move on.
Looking Toward the Future
At a time of economic, technological, and labor evolutions, organizations have to change to compete for the best talent. As I learned, that meant looking in new places and in new ways, taking care of families more than ever before, and helping those who leave succeed so that they continue to be good examples to those who might join up.
When I took the oath of office, with just two years left in the Obama administration, I believed firmly that even if I could not finish everything I started, it was important to get many innovative initiatives, including the Force of the Future program, set in motion. The logic behind these initiatives is irrefutable, so I’m confident they will continue. As the new Secretary of Defense, new commander-in-chief, and new Congress continue to shape the Force of the Future, I believe they can build on these lessons. Our security depends on it.
Ash Carter was the 25th Secretary of Defense of the United States. He is now the Director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Innovation Fellow.
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