Personnel System Is the Foe

[thedrifter]

09-29-2003

Army Crisis: Personnel System Is the Foe



First of 2 Parts


By Donald E. Vandergriff



“If you don’t make dramatic changes within a year to large organizations, changes will not occur at all.” – Jack Welch, The GE Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO, by Robert Slater, 1998



“If I knew now what I should have known then about the personnel bureaucracy, I would have focused more of my time changing it. It [the personnel bureaucrats] waited me out and all the changes we made faded away.” – Gen. Edward “Shy” Meyer, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff, 1998



I keep watching bold and corrective proposals to improve the U.S. Army today getting cut to pieces on the chopping blocks of compromise. In my comprehensive analysis of attempts at reform to the Army’s personnel system (Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution of Human Affairs, Presidio Press, April 2002), I found that when compromises are made primarily to appease personnel managers and special-interest groups dedicated to keeping the status quo – who do not understand warfare or military effectiveness – the subsequent reforms are so watered down that they do not deliver the promised effectiveness.



Then, senior leaders and personnel people point and say, “They don’t work – where we were was fine.” The Army then returns to its tried-and-true (and doomed-to-fail) solution to achieving effectiveness – more money.



Once again, opponents of reform are dead wrong. Several reform initiatives on the street – in particular, the proposed Unit Manning System including both unit rotations and unit cohesion life cycles – promises to transform the force by maximizing the Army’s combat effectiveness for major conflicts today and in the future.



But to do so, Army leaders must be bold and demonstrate the strength of character to focus on an all-embracing transformation of the personnel system, the centerpiece of service culture.



They must reject attempts by the personnel bureaucracy to dilute the changes and weaken the reforms in the name of “compromise.”



A transformed personnel system will move the Army from the industrial or attrition form of warfare to the ability to conduct genuine maneuver warfare. It will provide “ready now” Army forces that if coordinated in a deployment cycle with naval, air and special operations units will be able to deploy at a moment’s notice and ready to fight upon reaching the theater of operations.



Operational commanders will be able to assemble indisputably Joint Task Forces from out of the various units whose with leaders, staffs and troops have trained together a unit manning cycle. (Under the unit manning cycle, other forces will be either preparing for redeployment to home base from overseas, or conducting initial training for future missions.)



There is urgent need to implement reform now.



With hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iraq, senior military leaders are warning that the U.S. military is seriously overstretched and that the tempo of operations is running them ragged.



Seven months ago, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was correct when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February that it would require at least 200,000 troops to carry out a postwar occupation of Iraq.



Shinseki was heavily criticized at the time for his remarks, but we have 170,000 troops in Iraq today (down from a maximum of 220,000 several months ago). Meanwhile, the Pentagon this week announced substantial new reserve and National Guard mobilizations will occur in the months ahead to cover the manpower gap.



Shinseki in February also warned the Army needed to expand from its current 10 divisions to 12 to carry out current requirements. But this assumes that the antiquated and overly rigid Army personnel system remains intact.



I believe that the Army can do a better job on how it manages personnel. This requires once and for all replacing the obsolete personnel system and an out-of-date force structure with a system geared to the rapid-response nature of contemporary conflicts.



Overstretch and “hollowness” are caused by too many demands on the force. They stem from the inefficient way in which all of the services manage people and by current efforts to maintain readiness. The “tempo problem” has three manifestations:



* PERSTEMPO: The most significant tempo problem occurs when the personnel system rapidly moves people, mainly officers and senior NCOs, from assignment to assignment in order to meet the demands of individual career advancement.



* WORKTEMPO: The second tempo problem arises when commanders, determined to have a well-trained unit or concerned about having a successful command tour, overwork their people.



* DEPTEMPO: The third tempo problem arises when people deploy to meet operational or training demands. This form of tempo could easily be managed if the problems caused by PERSTEMPO and WORKTEMPO were resolved. The readiness reporting system exacerbates the tempo problem because it counts only numbers and grades and gives no readiness credit for time in unit or levels of collective skills achieved. The current readiness reporting system virtually forces the services to move people around in order to appear to have ready units.



The DoD personnel system, characterized by the individual replacement system and the Officer/NCO career management system, is the primary cause of these problems. American units and service members have long suffered from the excessive personnel turbulence and careerism caused by the personnel system, which was last codified at the end of World War II.



Over the years, several Army Chiefs and Marine Commandants have tried but failed to reform the system in their service.



The Army can create units that are more ready and service members who are more satisfied by changing the personnel system. The key aspects of such a change would be to use a unit replacement system – rather than a system based on individual replacements – and to allow officers and NCOs to manage their own careers.



A unit rotation system would allow units to keep people together for three or more years and would allow units to develop true competence, e.g., Delta Force and the SEALs. Allowing officers and NCOs to manage their own careers, in conjunction with the elimination of counter productive policies like “up or out,” would allow individuals to develop true expertise in skills that are becoming increasingly important.



Transforming the personnel system thus sharply increases readiness and proficiency while lowering personnel stress and enhancing the satisfaction of individual service members.



A new personnel system also is essential to obtaining the benefits of DoD Transformation.



Army leaders have no choice: They must immediately begin efforts to create a new personnel system.



Next: Personnel reforms are key to winning future wars.



Donald Vandergriff is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at vandergriffdonald@usa.net.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=208&rnd=782.3985600245115


Sempers,

Roger
:marine:

[thedrifter]

09-30-2003

Army Crisis: Form a Personnel Transformation Task Force



Last of 2 parts



By Donald Vandergriff



“We are killing ourselves with these back-to-back rotations, with the constant changes in command and leadership, with the hidebound determination to conduct today’s new type of war with the old Cold War force structure and personnel system.” – Anonymous Army colonel, August 2003



The U.S. Army can build a force that can fight “come as you are wars” at present while preserving the force for a major conflict in the future. But we have a long way to go to replace the World War II-based force structure (with its large overhead, long train-up and deployment times an unwieldy logistics tail) that robs us of the strategic and operational initiative.



The Pentagon does not have to wait for new technology to leverage potential combat power. It does not have to ask for more manpower to meet contingency operations. It simply has to change the way it manages its units and people, and the way it structures its forces.



The strategy I foresee for reforming the U.S. military is to embrace a strategy of “parallel evolution.” By this term, I mean that the institutions that compose a military will evolve parallel to the changing face of war itself. This includes force structure, acquisition policy, warfighting doctrine and the personnel system all changing together to adapt to the evolving face of warfare itself.



For the U.S. Army, this change centers around a new Unit-based Personnel System that promotes and builds cohesion – based on stable personnel rosters, extended terms of leadership and prolonged training time – that allows units to reach their full military potential.



Such units in turn transfer to theater commanders for their use on manning cycles. This will not repeat the Army’s failed COHORT program of the 1980s. It will constitute the wholesale moving of units between headquarters on a grand, scheduled basis. The new concept does not apply DEROS to individual service personnel, but to entire units. Even so, a soldier will expect to be on a deployment cycle for one year out of a three-year cycle.



There are two options the Army could use in implementing the Unit-based Personnel System, either regimental (regional vs. national) system, or a division-based. Both options would home base soldiers and their families, and put units on a unit rotation schedule similar to what the Navy has long done with its aircraft carrier groups.



Another key provision is that officer accessions become a “professions-based” model. The end-state is to give more experience earlier to officers, and get away from the tradition of the lieutenant being the most inexperienced member of a unit, and the most lost. The military is the one remaining profession – in the classical sense – that refuses to use professional examinations for entrance. Officers could arrive at the unit, after attendance at an Army Basic School (The Army is now proposing the Basic Leader’s Course BOLC to replace the 16 branch basic courses) for all officers.



This would change the industrial-based, numbers mindset of the Army (“Better no officer than a bad officer”) with the use of a mandatory enlisted requirement for entry-level personnel who would be trained, supervised and reviewed for commissioning and promotions by tools such as a professional entrance examination, multiple evaluation tools (in addition to the standard evaluation report. This would help create an experienced leader much earlier in his or her career than under the current system. And creating a dual-track officer system would allow officers to master the art of war at the tactical and operational levels without playing career chess moving all over the place to satisfy out of date requirements to become generalized. The Army could finally jettison its ancient and inefficient “up or out” promotion system to a more flexible “up or stay” system.



This new officer management system would allow for the creation of a General Staff officer career track for exceptional officers. Freed from the “up or out” curse, they would focus on the strategic and operational levels of war over a prolonged period of their careers. Also, similarly identified officers could remain at the tactical/support/installation level without being punished as long as they continue to demonstrate mental and physical proficiency. Building such an experienced officer corps, without the promotion anxieties and careerism that come with the current personnel system, would allow the Army to learn, practice and master maneuver warfare.



Maneuver warfare means more than movement of forces. It implies cultural adjustments by changing from a “top down” culture to a culture of “bottom up” decision-making that provides more autonomy for younger leaders. Lieutenants and captains would have more time in troop-leading positions and specialized billets such as aviation. Existing specialties would be merged into new categories such as “combined arms expert” or “combat decision-maker” as *the Army redefines the core functions of its officers and NCOs under the new system.



The basic thrust would be to decentralize personnel management by stripping power from the personnel bureaucrats and placing it in the hands of unit commanders and senior NCOs.



Here is the outline of an implementation plan for revolutionizing the Army by transforming its early 20th century personnel system into a 21st century model of flexibility and efficiency:



Any effort to transform the military’s personnel and unit management systems constitutes an enormous undertaking. A good implementation plan should perform a number of specific functions: It should identify the goals of the personnel management and the unit management system. It should also identify the specific things that need to be changed.



* It should identify what existing concepts need to be changed to.



* It should identify how the changes should be made, in what order, and on what schedule.



* It should identify the full range of obstacles and potential negative outcomes the changes may face or create, and devise ways to avoid them (The Army’s Unit Manning Task Force has done a good job doing this, but this has to be done for the entire personnel system).



* Outsiders cannot change the military effectively. Military officers created the current personnel and unit management systems and they should be the catalysts for changing them. Senior officers must make implementation decisions, but more junior officers – those who live with and understand the problems, who recognize the need for change, and who will inherit the Army – should design the new system.



To this end, the Army leadership should create a small implementation team of serving Army officers and NCOs who will be responsible for identifying the problems and devising the solutions. The team could meet periodically over a three-to-six-month time frame for, perhaps, a week at a time, to devise the proposal for the new approach.



I recommend that the Army chief of staff direct that this implementation team should come out of the current Unit Manning Task Force and become the Army’s Personnel Transformation Task Force.



It would not be difficult for a Personnel Transformation Task Force that gets underway in October 2003 to complete a transformation plan in one year. Then the revolution can begin at long last.



Donald Vandergriff is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at vandergriffdonald@usa.net.

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=210&rnd=843.3800060031918


Sempers,

Roger
:marine: