Modernizing Officer Career Management

by Albert A. Robbert

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Among the statutory, policy, cultural, and fiscal considerations across the 11 officer management issues, cultural considerations were the most prominent.

Addressing each issue would require specific statutory or policy changes, and some issues were of little to no interest to the services.

The services were open to experimentation with available flexibilities for only four issues.

An incremental approach that largely preserves the existing system but allows for smaller changes over time appears to be the most realistic way to modernize officer management.

The 2018 and 2019 National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs) required the Department of Defense (DoD) to provide three reports that addressed an extensive list of potential statutory and policy changes in military officer career management. (Some of these potential changes were put into effect through the 2019 NDAA.) RAND's National Defense Research Institute (NDRI) was asked to help obtain perspectives from the military departments and services about the issues covered in the three reports.

While deliberating the issues in the NDRI report, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) officials identified 11 additional issues related to modernizing officer career management; they asked NDRI to examine these 11 issues in a subsequent study. Specifically, NDRI was to determine whether there were any statutory, policy, cultural, or fiscal constraints on officer management flexibilities; gather service perspectives on these constraints; and offer potential mitigation strategies.

What We Did

To better enable analysis, we sorted the 11 issues into three categories: promotions, tenure, and an "other" category for unrelated issues. The five promotion issues are the following:

promotion alternatives for technical-track competitive categories

possibilities for different competitive categories to have different promotion rates and frequency

ensuring that officers who opt out of promotion consideration are not adversely affected at future statutory boards

reserve commissions for active-duty officers[1]

promotion board guidance about deployability.

The three tenure issues are the following:

more-liberal policies for stagnant officers (officers who detract from or no longer contribute effectively to service objectives)

removal of age limits for accessions

contracted service for officers.

The three other issues are the following:

providing for a continuum of service among active and reserve personnel

the use of warrant officers (WOs) and limited duty officers (LDOs) in all the services

the selective use of officers without rank.

We began by qualitatively assessing the existing professional and academic literature on the 11 areas of interest. We then used that review to develop a baseline understanding of the limitations on officer management flexibilities and to create a framework for assessing statutory, policy, cultural, and fiscal constraints. We also conducted additional quantitative analysis when the literature or stakeholder suggestions raised research questions that allowed for modeling with readily accessible Defense Manpower Data Center data.

We then engaged in stakeholder discussion with current policymakers—including principals and other representatives from OSD, officials in the service secretariats, and military staffs responsible for officer management policy—to confirm or disconfirm our findings. As a final step in obtaining service perspectives, these same representatives reviewed a draft of our report for accuracy. We also consulted with RAND officer management experts to enhance our understanding of constraints on officer management flexibilities.

What We Found

Constraints

Table 1 shows that cultural constraints (the highlighted column) are the most common obstacles to potential officer management modernization, affecting all 11 issues. Statutory and policy constraints were unlikely to affect potential promotion issues, and fiscal constraints did not affect these issues at all. Statutory, policy, and fiscal constraints were much more likely to affect tenure and other issues.

Culture limits adoption of change for all 11 issues, mainly because OSD and the military services are all wary of changes for which outcomes are uncertain. Historically, the military has pursued an incremental approach to officer management reform to ensure that the officer management structure continues to be predictable and stable. An approach that scales reforms to small populations (at least initially) and avoids implementing more than one reform at a time could eventually add considerable flexibility to the system. At the same time, an incremental approach that largely preserves the existing system but allows for the accumulation of smaller changes and insights over time appears to be the most realistic way to eventually establish a new 21st-century system that breaks with many of the principles of officer management as they exist today.