A Thought Experiment: Can the Army be made Efficient? Pt. 1

I’m in the Army. One of the chief topics of conversation when talking with other Army folks is assignments– what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, oh wow, how’d you get to do that?! And so on. This is in large part because the many and varied assignments out there are something that all military folks have in common, and is one of the benefits (or penalties, depending on your point of view) of being in the service. Being at the same post or holding the same job as someone else instantly builds rapport with someone you’ve just met, especially if it’s a place or unit with higher-than-average across-the-board morale. If you find two folks who were at Fort Bragg in the 82nd Airborne, for instance, they’ll happy jabber for minutes (if not hours, Airborne!) about running on Ardennes, the pain-in-the-butt of having to manifest for a jump at 0400, that a-hole at Range Control who shut us down that one time, etc.

I expect this is not different from civilians who have lived and worked in the same place at one time or another, particularly within a business or institution. But in the Army it’s a bit different because your assignments are not up to you to choose, for the most part. They are inflicted upon you.

The Army’s personnel management program, a great central-planning beast of an organization, is known (uncreatively) as Human Resources Command, or HRC. HRC dictates, based on guidance from Big Army, where soldiers go; what their jobs are going to be; how long they’re going to be in those jobs; what particular job specialties are needed (Military Occupational Specialties, or MOSs), and where, and who’s going to fill them; who gets promoted, and when; and a few other HR-type functions. For officers like me, there’s a person who sits up at HRC for each branch (Infantry, Armor, etc.) and manages the careers of all officers in a certain year-group range. This person is called your branch manager. The person controls, given some constraints passed down by Army, where you are going and what you are going to do there. In no uncertain terms, he has control over your life and career.

Branch managers are notoriously overworked (or lazy, depending), hard to get ahold of, and–just like enlisted soldiers’ recruiters–constantly lie about what they can and are going to do for you. As a result, many soldiers (and officers– enlisted soldiers are semantically differentiated from officers in the Army, but I use them interchangeably here. As a side note, enlisted also have branch reps/managers, but since they are often at posts for long periods of time compared with the average of two years at a post for Officers, the branch manager plays less of a leading role in their careers except for certain mandatory roles such as drill sergeant and recruiter) are dissatisfied about their postings, their positions, and what Big Army has done for them lately.

Officers then get aggravated and frustrated with constant moves and sub-optimal posts and positions that take them off their desired career paths or away from their families. This leads to retention problems with officers who are unhappy with where they’re going in the Army, through no fault of their own. Of course, there are officers who are very happy with where they’ve ended up, but (and this is anecdotal, but borne out from friends’ stories) the officer who is consistently happy with his assignment is either a) very lucky, b) connected, or c) happy with anything. He is not the norm.

The units who get these officers, too, are not always happy with the result. There are shortages and surpluses of personnel, as you’d expect in any centrally managed system. If you’ve ever been in a unit where an infantryman has filled the logistician’s slot, and there have been two or three extra captains or lieutenants in the S3, then you have a perfect example of shortages vs. surpluses in the Army. There might be an Intel captain who’s deployed and filling a staff position he’s really not suited to (like me!), and another unit standing up for deployment that’s either a) not getting a bona-fide Intel guy, or b) getting one at the last possible minute to meet guidelines set by Big Army. Or perhaps the intel guy at the unit is incompetent, but he’s filling the S2 slot, so he can’t be moved. Not an ideal solution in either case.

The point is this: The Army has an antiquated, centrally-planned personnel-management system that results in average-to-low soldier satisfaction, average-to-low customer (unit) satisfaction, and rewards people who have connections over meeting the needs of the unit. In very few other non-governmental organizations in the United States (I am aware of none) is central planning done at this scale (very large), at this level of efficiency (very low), with a group of people who cannot vote with their feet.

I propose a new system. My system is based off of a basic economic assumption: That a free market is more efficient in allocating scarce assets than a centrally planned market. If you’re unfamiliar with this, please check out Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics, which is a great book and course in itself.
Here is my proposal: That personnel management becomes a function of an “open market”, with a central clearing-house of information on available personnel provided by HRC, perhaps similar to a Monster.com model, and with Officer Record Briefs (ORBs) and Enlisted Record Briefs (ERBs) provided as Resumes. Unit budgets would actually pay the salaries of their personnel. Units would competefor personnel through a price system, a la the marketplace hiring system at play in the US now. Personnel would have to go somewhere, but could choose an offer (or apply for one) based on their qualifications and desires. This is an application of a well-known economic system (i.e. the one the United States is based on) with observed results (see A.D. 1988 to 1991 in world history) to an organization that relies on a historical relic for one of its most important functions: getting the right people to the right place at the right time.

I’ll address some methods of implementation, difficulties, effects, applications, and objections in subsequent posts.

I of course welcome comments.