[Senate Hearing 114-321]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-321
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE PERSONNEL REFORM AND STRENGTHENING THE ALL-
VOLUNTEER FORCE
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 2, 2015
__________
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COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona, Chairman
JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma JACK REED, Rhode Island
JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama BILL NELSON, Florida
ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia
DEB FISCHER, Nebraska JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
TOM COTTON, Arkansas KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut
JONI ERNST, Iowa JOE DONNELLY, Indiana
THOM TILLIS, North Carolina MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii
DAN SULLIVAN, Alaska TIM KAINE, Virginia
MIKE LEE, Utah ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico
TED CRUZ, Texas
Christian D. Brose, Staff Director
Elizabeth L. King, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
__________
december 2, 2015
Page
Department of Defense Personnel Reform and Strengthening the All-
Volunteer Force................................................ 1
Chu, Hon. David S.C., President and Chief Executive Officer,
Institute for Defense Analysis................................. 5
Rostker, Hon. Bernard, Senior Fellow, Rand Corporation........... 11
Hale, Hon. Robert F., Fellow, Booz Allen Hamilton................ 19
Roughead, Admiral Gary, USN [Ret.], Annenberg Distinguished
Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution............................ 26
(iii)
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE PERSONNEL REFORM AND STRENGTHENING THE ALL-
VOLUNTEER FORCE
----------
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2015
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:29 a.m. in Room
SD-G50, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator John McCain
(chairman) presiding.
Committee members present: Senators McCain, Inhofe, Ayotte,
Fischer, Cotton, Rounds, Ernst, Tillis, Sullivan, Lee, Reed,
McCaskill, Manchin, Shaheen, Gillibrand, Donnelly, Hirono,
Kaine, and King.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHN McCAIN, CHAIRMAN
Chairman McCain. Good morning. The committee meets this
morning to continue our series of hearings focused on defense
reform. Today, we will focus on military and civilian personnel
reform and how to strengthen the All-Volunteer Force in the
21st century.
We're fortunate to have a distinguished group of witnesses
joining us today: The Honorable David Chu, President and CEO
[Chief Executive Officer] of the Institute for Defense Analysis
and former Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and
Readiness.
David, we have a long a relationship, and we appreciate all
the great work that you have done.
The Honorable Bernard Rostker, who is a RAND Corporation
Senior Fellow, also a former Under Secretary of Defense for
Personnel and Readiness. The Honorable Robert Hale, Booz Allen
Hamilton Fellow and former Under Secretary of Department of
Defense Comptroller. And Admiral Gary Roughead, USN [United
States Navy] [Retired], Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow
at the Hoover Institution and former Chief of Naval Operation.
Put simply, our All-Volunteer Force is the greatest
fighting force in human history. Any consideration of personnel
reform must begin from that basis. And all of us, the Congress
and the Department of Defense, must take great care as we
consider what changes are needed to ensure that our force can
respond to the needs of a new generation of warfighters and
meet our future challenges. Our efforts must proceed from
rigorous factfinding and analysis. We must always ask what
problems we are trying to solve. We must always measure any
reform against the military's unique mission of combat
effectiveness. And we must always remember that what works for
the private sector or society at large may not always work best
for our military.
We've all heard the stories of the many excellent
servicemembers who are choosing, or being forced, to leave the
military for ridiculous personnel reasons. This is a real
problem. But, it's made more complicated by the fact that so
many talented officers and enlisted continue to fill the ranks
of our force. All of us meet them every day across the country
and around the world.
The question is whether our military is able to recruit and
retain so many excellent Americans because of its personnel
system or in spite of it. I'm concerned that all too often it
is the latter, as in the acquisition system and other parts of
our defense organization. Too often, our military is losing and
misusing talent because of an archaic military personnel
system. Promotions are handed out according to predictable
schedules with only secondary consideration of merit. That's
why, even after more than a decade of service, there is
necessarily no difference in rank among officers of the same
age. Is it really because they all perform the same or deserve
the same rank? Jobs in the military are assigned rather than
chosen. To some extent, that is necessary. After all, the
mission must always come first. But, we should ask whether we
can better support this mission by giving servicemembers more
of a say in their assignments.
At the Reagan Defense Forum last month, for example, the
Chief of Staff of the Army, General Milley, described how he
had met a soldier who spoke six languages but had been assigned
as a truck driver. We need truck drivers, of course, but we
also need first-rate linguists and intelligence analysts, and
we need a personnel system that can manage our people's talent
accordingly. We should ask whether we should give commanders
greater discretion to build a staff with the specialists and
experts they need in the right positions. Commanders are better
able to assess their needs than bureaucrats in the personnel
system.
Our military has always had an entrepreneurial culture that
encourages individuals to innovate, but the military personnel
system undermines that spirit when it mistakes upholding
professionalism with enforcing conformity. And when high
standards give way to a zero-defect mentality in performance
evaluations, this discourages risk taking, truth-telling, and
cultivation of entrepreneurial leaders.
To strengthen the All-Volunteer Force, we must also review
the promotion system, especially the requirements of the
Defense Officers Personnel Management Act and the Goldwater-
Nichols reforms. Previous witnesses have expressed concern that
the joint duty requirements that a military officer must meet
have contributed to the growth in headquarters staff that we
have seen in recent decades as the personnel system seeks to
check a series of boxes that may be of little value for actual
career development. We need to review whether this requirement
is meaningfully enhancing the joint capabilities of the force,
and how it can be better tailored for our 21st century force.
The personnel system cannot be and end in itself. Similarly, we
must ensure that our civilian personnel system is equally
capable of recruiting and retaining the best leaders.
Unfortunately, there is much work to do. The USAJob system,
for example, is an abysmal failure. We are repeatedly told by
managers that they can't hire the employees they need to fill
mission-critical roles because they cannot hire qualified
individuals through the USAJob system or because they cannot
make job offers in a reasonable timeframe. The Department of
Defense needs to devote more energy to resolving these hiring
stalemates, not developing more--many bureaucracies that have
so often failed before.
Finally, a key pillar of personnel reform will continue to
pertain to compensation. This committee has made great strides
this year with the most sweeping reforms of our military
retirement system in seven decades. We must bring the same
rigorous bipartisan approach to the task of reforming the
military health system next year. If we do nothing, the
Congressional Budget Office projects that defense healthcare
costs will devour about 11 percent of the defense budget in
2028. This is staggering. Every dollar that the Department of
Defense spends on healthcare is a dollar that can't be spent on
training and equipping our warfighters.
While we need to slow the growth of defense health
spending, the primary focus of our reform efforts must be to
create a better healthcare system for servicemembers, military
families, and retirees by improving access to care, quality of
care, and health outcomes. We must identify and eliminate waste
in the military healthcare system and evaluate the
organizational structure of the services' medical departments,
with an eye toward making them flatter, more efficient, and
more responsive. In some cases, we may need to eliminate some
organizations where infrastructure--while ensuring that we
maintain and improve medical readiness.
With these and other reforms, we can make the military
health system perform better for beneficiaries and more
sustainable for the Department of Defense. It's often said that
America's greatest military advantage is its people. That is
not a talking point, it's a reality. We will consider input
from all sides throughout this process, starting with our
witnesses today.
I thank you for your willingness to appear before the
committee, and I look forward to your testimony.
Senator Reed.
STATEMENT OF SENATOR JACK REED
Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Let me join you in thanking the witnesses for being here
today, but, more importantly, for your extraordinary service to
the Nation. You have come with great expertise and insights to
address a very important topic.
The committee has held a series of hearings to review the
organizational structure of the Department. Experts have
testified the importance of streamlining our defense
acquisition process, reevaluating the roles and missions of the
services, ensuring effective management of the Department, and
in the formulation of our defense strategy and future force
structure. But, I believe today's hearing may be among the most
important this committee will convene during our review.
The men and women who make up the All-Volunteer Force
remain this committee's top concern. Any changes we recommend
to the processes, structure, and organization of the Department
of Defense, or to the benefits structure, will not matter if we
don't provide the Nation with a sufficiently sized, trained,
and equipped military of the necessary quality, of the
character and talent to meet national defense requirements.
To that end, Congress has, for several years, considered
various proposals for changes in compensation and healthcare to
slow the growth of personnel costs so that those savings could
be redirected to buy back readiness and modernization
shortfalls. The Department has consistently, over the past
several decades, proposed a budget in which military personnel
costs comprise roughly 33 percent, or a third, of that budget.
In 1980, this third devoted to military personnel bought an
Active Duty strength of over 2.1 million. Today, with the total
DOD [Department of Defense] budget that is hundreds of billions
of dollars higher, that third only buys 1.2 million Active Duty
members. And that figure continues to fall, and will likely
drop further if rising personnel costs are not constrained.
In my view, hard choices will need to be made, especially
in the budget environment we find ourselves. We made some
difficult choices this year, as the Chairman pointed out,
through his bipartisan leadership. They included the enactment
of a retirement benefit for tomorrow's force. But, we need to
do more. I am concerned, frankly, that we are pricing ourselves
out of a military that is sufficiently sized and trained to
accomplish national defense objectives. I look forward to any
recommendations the witnesses may have for addressing the
increasing personnel costs.
With regard to the management of military personnel, it is
time to reevaluate whether the Defense Officer Personnel
Management System, commonly referred to as DOPMA, continues to
meet the needs of our military services. The ``up or out''
promotion system is 70 years old, and, in many respects, it has
worked, and continues to work, well. It ensures promotion
opportunity for talented young servicemembers as they progress
in their careers. But, it also has its weaknesses. In some
circumstances, it requires divestiture of talent at its peak.
It may not be the right system for highly technical
occupations, such as cyberexperts, pilots, doctors, or special
operators in whom we may have invested millions of dollars in
training. It relies on a cohort- based system that may be
outdated. Joint professional education requirements, a
signature element of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, may, in
some cases, be so substantial that servicemembers have
difficulty fitting in all the required training, joint
assignments, and command assignments needed for professional
development. I hope that our witnesses can, first and foremost,
identify what problems exist within the military personnel
management system and compensation system, and offer proposed
solutions to these problems that Congress and the Department of
Defense should consider to bring our military personnel up to
date.
I thank you all for your time, your expertise, and, most
importantly, your great service to the Nation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Welcome, Dr. Chu. Thank you for appearing
again before the committee.
STATEMENT OF HON. DAVID S.C. CHU, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE
OFFICER, INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE ANALYSIS
Dr. Chu. Mr. Chairman, thank you. It is a privilege,
indeed, to be part of the panel this morning.
I do have a prepared statement that I hope can be made part
of the record.
Chairman McCain. All prepared statements will be made part
of the record.
Dr. Chu. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I should emphasize that the comments I make are entirely my
own views, not necessarily the position of the institution that
I currently serve.
It's my belief that decisions about the issues that you and
Senator Reed have outlined and the committee is confronting
ultimately should be rooted in a set of choices about the kind
of military force we want for the future 5, 10, 15, 20 years
from now. And the characteristics of that force will
ultimately, in my estimation, determine what kinds of personnel
we need and how we should prepare those personnel for their
responsibilities.
In my estimation, one of the high-payoff, high-leverage
opportunities lies, from both a performance and a cost
perspective, in the decision about the mix of personnel types
for the future. To what degree do we want to rely on Active
Duty military personnel? What's the role of the Reserve
components? What should be the proper level of Federal civilian
staffing? And to what extent do we want to use civilians
engaged through contractor arrangements of one sort or another?
I might emphasize that those arrangements exhibit a great
variety of characteristics, and, in some ways, we might
usefully experiment with additional varieties of contractor
arrangements, going forward.
The Department today, institutionally, does not make this
decision in a holistic manner. It decides each of--it decides
how much of each community it desires separately. So, military
end strength is considered at one point, civilians are a
decentralized hiring decision left largely to the field, and so
on and so forth. So, it does not examine the trade-offs among
these personnel, which I think present extraordinary
opportunities for the country.
Looking at the likely effect of budget constraints, it's
my--that the Department will probably choose to rely more
heavily on Reserve components of one fashion or another, and
perhaps look at a different role for civilians, especially
Federal civilians.
In managing these communities, it would be my plea that we
move away from the implicit premise of the current systems,
which is one-size-fits-all, as you pointed out in your opening
statement. It's particularly true of other officer management
system, DOPMA. My urging would be to encourage experimentation
within the waiver authority the Department already possess
under a declaration of national emergency and 2 years
thereafter, although Congress could grant an additional waiver
authority, if it so chose, and encourage its actual use. In
fact, the Department could begin with experiments on the
enlisted force side, because most of the enlisted force rules
are a product of policy, not a product of statute.
Now, as you look at the civilian management issue, in my
estimation--and you pointed out this issue, Mr. Chairman, in
your statements about USAJobs--most important--one of the most
important issues is appointing authority. Department does not
have, under Title 5 of the various Federal Civil Service
systems, operates the latter two to appoint, and to appoint
properly, that I think is needed in today's environment.
In fact, Secretary Carter is fond of pointing out that,
except for the fact that the office in which he got his first
DOD job had extraordinary appointing authority, special
appointing authority, he could not have been hired by the
Department of Defense as a young academic.
I also believe that we ought to look at investing more
energetically in our civilian workforce. It's quite ironic, in
the Department of Defense, on the military side, we have a
well-established and much-admired training education system on
the civilian side. We leave the employees' department largely
to their own devices.
I endorse what you underlined, Mr. Chairman, and that
Secretary Carter has opened the door upon with his Force of the
Future speech, and that is, a greater us of volunteers in self-
selection. Give the individual greater voice in his or her
future assignments, further training, education, et cetera.
On the compensation front, the Congressional Budget Office
has long pointed out that the military system puts too much in
deferred compensation and pays too much in kind. And we know
that compensation is much more effective if it's in cash and
it's up front. And the changes made by the Congress this year
to the retirement system move in that constructive direction.
In fact, in my estimation, they open the possibility of a much
wider range of experience targets for the Department by skill
area that's much more responsive to issues like the need for
cyber personnel that Senator Reed--to which Senator Reed
pointed.
I do think further--a further look should be taken at how
we treat single personnel in the military. They make up just
under half the force. Much of their compensation is really in
kind, because, at the junior level, especially, about one-third
of the package is the housing allowance, and they must
surrender that housing allowance in order to live in the
barracks. Because we tell them to live in the barracks, we know
from similar results that living in the barracks is not one of
the great attractions of military service.
On the civilian front, in compensation, I plead for a
return to the use of pay bands to give the Department greater
flexibility in civilian compensation so that in areas of high
cost, high demand for certain skills, it can pay more
competitively; in areas where there isn't the same situation,
it could be more austere in its compensation choices.
Whatever compensation system we select, I would urge that
we set and honor the expectations that's established. I'm very
concerned about the actions of the last several years in which,
often, changes the compensation have a flavor of being
arbitrary and driven by budget considerations. And I think it's
important that we set a standard and keep to that standard so
that the young people who join the American military
establishment understand the future that they have selected,
and are enthusiastic about that choice.
I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Chu follows:]
The Prepared Statement by Dr. David S. C. Chu
creating 21st century personnel and compensation systems for the
department of defense
introduction
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: It is a privilege to
participate in this morning's panel. The views I express are entirely
my own, and should not be interpreted as reflecting any position on the
part of the Institute for Defense Analyses.
In my judgment, ``human capital''--people, their skills and
esprit--lie at the heart of any successful military endeavor. Deciding
whom you want to serve in your military establishment, how you wish to
develop their ``capital'', and how you expect them to perform, are
essential elements in meeting the nation's security needs. The answers
to these questions, in turn, should derive from the future military at
which you wish to aim, the capabilities you wish it to possess, and the
challenges you believe it must be ready to confront.
Those answers include basic decisions about how many actually wear
a uniform (and are therefore governed by the laws of war), how many
will be civilian employees of the national military establishment
(therefore performing with the authority of the government), and how
the private sector might provide key services on which both military
and civilian functions depend, perhaps in a partnership arrangement.
For each community, you will want to specify the characteristics of the
personnel you wish to recruit, the preparation and ongoing education
and training they should receive, and the service trajectory you expect
them to follow.
Grounding the human capital debate in the force you desire also
implies it is the force characteristics that should drive personnel
policies, not the other way around. This is especially true as today's
evolving technology and international security environments alter US
needs. It is the responsibility of the compensation system, broadly
defined, to produce these desired force characteristics. A key element
is the competitiveness of compensation, both military and civilian,
with non-government opportunities. And from the enterprise perspective,
there is an appropriate concern with costs.
The ultimate cost issue, of course, is not military compensation
alone, but what is required overall to operate the Department.
Operating costs dominate the Department's budget requirements. They are
driven by military equipment decisions (including the reliability of
that equipment); by business practices (including, for example, the
statutory floor for government depot work, and the impediments to A-76
competitions); and by choices on the mix of active military, Reserve
Component military, federal civilian, and contractor personnel.
choosing the mix
On the last set of issues (the staffing mix), Secretary Carter
recently called for more ``permeability''--if I understand correctly,
to attract a wider variety of experience and backgrounds in both
military and federal civilian personnel. He announced a series of
initiatives to address this issue. Some of those confront what his
Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness has
identified, the difficulties created by the federal civilian personnel
system, including those involving appointing authority.
The Department faces two obstacles in considering the optimal mix
of personnel, one a planning challenge, one institutional. The planning
challenge is defining the structure--the nature--of the force of the
future. The Department has struggled to meet this challenge since the
end of the Cold War, with its initial responses a scaled-down version
of its prior choices (Base Force, Bottom-Up Review). Besides the growth
of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance force elements
(including cyber), that remains, as a generalization, the case today.
Much of the structure is aimed at high-end, state-on-state conflict,
for which we must be prepared, but with little devoted to the
challenges we face immediately. The structure emphasizes the ability to
destroy targets, not necessarily the ability to secure the political or
political-military outcomes we desire. Securing a broader range of
capabilities within likely budget limits may require accepting hedges
vice full-up solutions, perhaps involving greater use of Reserve
Component authorities (conceivably new authorities), and of civilians.
The second obstacle is institutional. The Department's planning
processes, as long constituted, do not adequately consider the ``total
force'' solution space in arriving at the mix. Military personnel are
decided and budgeted for in terms of a central account (end strength),
and once the strength level is established, military personnel are
``free'' to the using elements of DOD. (Conversely, they cannot easily
trade military personnel for federal civilians or contractors.) In this
situation, it is not surprising that in most Military Departments the
demand for military personnel, as substantiated in various manning
documents, exceeds the planned supply, especially for active duty
forces.
At the other extreme sit federal civilians. Their numbers are
decided on a largely decentralized basis, but often restrained to
produce budgetary savings through ceilings (notwithstanding the
statutory provision barring such a practice outside of management
headquarters). That leaves contracted services as the safety valve, as
organizations strive to meet their needs with the funds available.
Repeated analyses demonstrate that there are significant gains
possible from a more systematic approach to deciding on the total force
mix.
It would be easy to paint too discouraging a picture about the
tradeoff process, and only fair to note some of the exceptions. One
interesting development is the Air Force's pursuit of composite units,
staffed with a mix of active, National Guard and Reserve personnel,
benefitting from the differing levels of service that can reasonably be
expected from each community. Another is the long-standing Inherently
Governmental/Commercial Activity database maintained by DOD, which
allows you to examine military-civil tradeoffs (and whose results have
long argued DOD could make greater use of civilians). Particular
Secretaries of Defense have taken an interest in this issue, whether
Secretary Rumsfeld in military-civilian trades (to conserve military
personnel for the Long War) and in competitive sourcing (an initiative
of the George W. Bush administration), or the in-sourcing initiative
launched by Secretary Gates. The last two, of course, are now
restricted by statutory restraints.
Staffing mix issues extend beyond broad categories of personnel to
include structural issues within each community. For example, the Army
has long solved the conundrum of ``up or out'' in the context of a
pilot force (high training costs, substantial payoff to experience,
implying long cockpit tours) by staffing extensively with warrant
officers, reserving just a few billets for (classically) commissioned
officers who are groomed for leadership positions. Presumably, as the
military becomes more highly technical this mechanism--or its analog,
the Navy's Limited Duty Officer--could be used more extensively.
Mechanisms like these might be used to strengthen the cyber force, and
other areas such as intelligence, language and cultural expertise,
science and technology, and acquisition.
Indeed, as one opens the aperture on personnel types it's quite
possible that some duties that are now thought to require officers
could be performed by enlisted personnel, given the high aptitude and
performance standards of the All-Volunteer Force. The current Air Force
Chief of Staff, as you know, has speculated about their possible
utilization to meet some piloting needs. Indeed, the Army, Navy and
Marine Corps already use enlisted personnel to operate Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles.
managing the mix
The Committee has expressed its interest in possibly reconsidering
provisions of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA), or
the Act in its entirety. I would urge that we first focus on the
different results that are desired, and analyze the degree to which it
is the statutory provisions that make it difficult to achieve those
results, versus the manner in which the Act is implemented. If
alternate regimes appear attractive, the Department might experiment
with those regimes (through existing or new waiver authority, or pilot
programs), to understand their possible unintended consequences, before
making them permanent.
While key elements of enlisted management parallel that for
officers, the rules are largely driven by policy, not statute. Enlisted
personnel, of course, constitute the vast majority of the force.
Perhaps the management paradigm for this element should receive our
attention first.
The challenges of the last fifteen years have demonstrated the
value of agility--agility at the individual level, and agility on the
part of defense institutions. American military personnel, starting
with the Battle of Bunker Hill, have been known for their agility.
Could we do even better, whether via the standards we set for
recruiting, or the manner in which we prepare the force?
In thinking about managing the mix in a more agile fashion, the
Department should be willing to consider hybrid vehicles--vehicles that
embrace the strengths of the different personnel communities. Secretary
Carter points in this direction with his emphasis on Intergovernmental
Personnel Act appointments, but more ambitious models might also be
considered. These include the British notion of sponsored reserves
(contractor operations in which all personnel hold Reserve Component
appointments, and can be shifted to a military status as theater
circumstances require), and Government Sponsored Enterprises, where the
government retains control but creates an entity that can operate like
a private sector actor (the Saint Lawrence Seaway is viewed as one of
the more successful examples, I believe).
One issue that has not received the attention it deserves is
strengthening the skills of existing federal civilians over the course
of their careers. The contrast in DOD could not be more striking:
Significant investments in further education and training for military
personnel, very limited opportunities for civilians. Some of this
result derives from the strictures of civil service rules, some from
the lack of budgetary allocations to support the necessary costs.
Greater investment in federal civilian ``human capital'' should pay
handsome dividends in long-term performance, and in the ability to
recruit and retain the talent that Secretary Carter is properly
seeking.
military and civil compensation
Economic principles and actual experience highlight six
characteristics of an effective compensation system:
--Cash compensation is more attractive than compensation in kind
--Compensation now is more attractive than compensation later
--Incentives for special situations (e.g., certain skills, or hard-
to-till positions) are more efficient than across-the-board solutions--
especially if implemented through a flexible versus a ``hard-wired''
system
--Clarity about the incentives you're offering (and the
compensation system as a whole) is critical
--Expectations about future compensation importantly drive current
results
--Recognizing individual preferences (``volunteerism'') can produce
a much more satisfied team, and lower long-run compensation costs
As the Congressional Budget Office has pointed out, the military
compensation system does not score well on these criteria. The civilian
compensation system may be better--but not much, in my judgment.
The current military pay system does offer the Department some
flexibility, thanks to the considerable leeway Title 10 gives the
Department in deciding the amounts and application of various special
and incentive pays. But the same is not as true for federal civilians,
because of the reliance on the General Schedule structure.
It is also important to acknowledge that compensation includes
more--sometimes much more--than pecuniary rewards. One of the most
important, of course, is pride and satisfaction in serving the country.
Recognition of such service is critical--and it is also critical to
keep in mind the effect of all conditions of service on the willingness
to join, the willingness to continue serving, and the enthusiasm with
which that service is rendered. ``Conditions of service'' embraces a
wide range of personnel and non-personnel decisions, ranging from how
assignments are made, to the frequency of change and the length of less
desirable or more difficult assignments, to education and training
opportunities, to the quality (and quantity) of equipment provided, and
to the excellence of leadership.
An important condition of service is the individual's ability to
influence his or her future--to choose, rather than be ``assigned''.
Civilians enjoy considerable latitude in this regard (even if civil
service realities can make it difficult), military personnel less so.
The Navy's administration of
Assignment Incentive Pay is a notable exception to this
generalization, as are some long-standing de facto processes of the
Reserve Components. Secretary Carter points the way to increased
reliance on the volunteer spirit, endorsing the concept pioneered by
the Army with its ``Green Pages'' experiment.
For military personnel, one of the most important conditions of
service involves the post-service transition. In our system, the
principal responsibility for that transition lies with the Department
of Veterans Affairs; thus its substantial resources (over $160 billion
in fiscal year 2015) and their most effective employment should not be
ignored in any reform agenda. (The Dole-Shalala Commission, for
example, urged major changes that the Congress declined to adopt.)
Within the Department of Defense's set of responsibilities, the recent
decision to strengthen the Transition Assistance Program is worth
noting--encouraging uniformed personnel to start thinking about their
post-service interests early in the military career. Such early
reflection presumably will help guide their education and training
choices.
The ``force of the future'' may look different from today's,
reflecting both changing needs (think cyber), and the changing nature
of our society (think opportunities for women, and changing views of
what constitutes a career). As we contemplate change, however, it is
worth reiterating that the current system sustained a successful all-
volunteer force in the concluding stage of the Cold War, in its
immediate aftermath (including the First Persian Gulf War), and in the
long period of armed conflict that followed the attacks of 9/11. There
are clearly elements that have worked well, or that have adapted
effectively.
Perhaps the most important success was recognizing that the
compensation ''package'' must remain competitive. Since we anticipate
that real compensation in the private sector will grow over time, so
will federal compensation. Those joining need to know that the
political system will act consistently with that reality (e.g., for
military compensation, sustaining the competitive standards set out by
the Ninth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation), and forbear
from making what appear to be arbitrary changes to the trajectory of
compensation as a source of near-term budget savings.
A focus on the competitive status of compensation also implies that
adjustments to military and federal civil pay packages (e.g., the pay
tables) will not necessarily be identical. That is in sharp contrast to
the practice of recent and earlier years, in which across-the-board
adjustments are matched.
Competitive compensation will not be the same for all skill areas.
The American military system confronts this reality using its bonus
authority. While there are bonus authorities for civilians, they are
not widely employed by most federal agencies, and may not provide the
same flexibility of response. Hence proposals to replace the General
Schedule with broad pay bands for federal civilians, allowing civilian
compensation to adjust for local and skill realities.
Much recent attention has focused on the cost of military
personnel. The reform of military retirement you've just adopted moves
more of the reward ``up front'', creating not only a more efficient
program (with some cost savings), but one that allows the Department to
vary career length by skill area, as operational needs argue should be
the case. The prior system encouraged a ``one size fits all''
mentality, with the result that some skill areas had a more senior
force than might be optimal, while others suffered from a lack of
needed experience, despite the Department's efforts to rebalance
through the use of retention incentives.
The Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission,
whose recommendations Congress considered in making its changes, also
proposed a revised military medical benefit. While the proposed change
would give military households more choice, and promised some
potentially substantial savings, it would also move modestly more
compensation to immediate cash (in the health expenditure accounts
created), whereas the current benefit is paid entirely in kind--a
compensation mechanism we know is less efficient.
One issue the Commission did not address is the disparity between
the compensation for single personnel, versus those with dependents--
perhaps five to ten percent for junior personnel, measured by Regular
Military Compensation (RMC). Moreover, RMC imputes the ``value'' of
living in the barracks as equal to the housing allowance foregone
(about one third of the total); we know from survey results that
required living in barracks housing is actually a detriment to military
recruiting. Would overall costs increase if single personnel were paid
at the same rate as those with dependents? Not necessarily, since there
would be offsetting cost reductions in other elements of compensation
(e.g., health care). Indeed, over the long run it might well reduce
costs. Such equilibration, coupled with a revised barracks residency
policy, amounts to a targeted (i.e., more efficient) pay change, likely
to ease the Army's current recruiting difficulty.
conclusions
The time is long past for a fundamental re-examination of the
appropriate mix of personnel types in the military establishment, as a
prelude to deciding what personnel management reforms may be needed for
the future military establishment. It is the nature of the future
military establishment that should be the starting point, guiding the
discussion on personnel types. Perhaps this debate could unfold in the
context of whatever national security transition plan a new
administration adopts, particularly as it conducts its Quadrennial
Defense Review.
With the caveat that those choices have not been made, it may be
useful to advance some hypotheses that could be explored in the interim
as a basis for any immediate decisions the Committee wishes to
consider. On the mix issue:
It is likely that more Reserve Component and federal
civilians will be desired, the latter requiring more flexible
appointing and pay authorities.
It is possible that more use of ``intermediate''
personnel--i.e., senior enlisted, warrants, LDOs [Limited Duty
Officer]--will be attractive in staffing certain military needs,
creating a viable approach to ``up or stay'' while preserving the best
features of ``up or out'' for those being considered for senior
leadership positions.
It is conceivable that hybrid staffing arrangements
will be sometimes be attractive, e.g., composite units, or Government
Sponsored Enterprises (e.g, for the DOD overseas Kindergarten-12 school
system).
On compensation:
Moving more military compensation to cash vice in kind
should improve recruiting and retention. Likewise making more cash
available earlier in a career would be meritorious, as the retirement
reform just enacted permits the Department to do.
Harnessing individual preferences to the needs of the
organization, consistent with the spirit of Secretary Carter's
demarche, will help restrain long-term compensation costs.
Creating greater flexibility in setting civilian pay
levels would allow DOD to respond better to local market conditions
(with savings in some areas financing increases in others).
Stabilizing expectations by adopting and honoring a
long-run compensation strategy for both military and civilian personnel
should help recruiting and retention--and morale.
As these hypotheses imply, much of what's needed lies in the
province of the Executive Branch of our government, above all to
organize the institutional mechanisms within which good decisions can
be made, including recommendations for statutory action where needed.
There is no more important set of decisions, if the United States is to
enjoy in the future as fine a military as defends us today.
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
Mr. Rostker.
STATEMENT OF HON. BERNARD ROSTKER, SENIOR FELLOW, RAND
CORPORATION
Dr. Rostker. Thank you, Chairman McCain and Ranking Member
Reed and members of this distinguished committee.
It's my pleasure and honor to be asked to testify today on
this very important issue. As you know, I've spent my whole
professional life working in this area, and have often written
about our need to reform the system, so I welcome this
opportunity to further discuss this today.
In many ways, the need for reform has been obscured
because, by and large, the system we have today has produced a
superb professional military. The problem as I see it is that
we could have done it better, perhaps at less cost, but
certainly, in terms of meeting the needs of our servicemembers
and their families. Moreover, as the threat and our needed
capabilities evolve, the only way to--of doing business in the
future is likely to be less effective as we move--as it has
been in the past. The trick here is to understand the current
system, how it operates, what needs to be changed. To use an
old cliche, we must not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Rethinking the kind of military we want, and how to achieve
that what some have called ``the force of the future'' is
needed, and your hearing today is very timely.
I've prepared a longer statement, but I want to highlight
for you here six points that I think are critical as you move
forward.
The first imperative is that you look at changing the
system. You ask what will be the impact of the experience
profile of the force 10 and 20 years in the future. For the
vast majority of our military workforce, the people we recruit
today will be the journeymen we need 10 years from now and the
leaders we need 20 years from now. While in some specific
areas, new programs of lateral entry may provide added
flexibility, the vast majority of military skills will still be
in at the bottom and up through the rank.
Second, the plain fact is that the military we build today
must be capable of winning wars in the future. But, we don't
know when that might be. In the aggregate, the year of service
profile is the best indicator of the readiness of the force to
go to war at any point of time in the future. Maintaining the
appropriate experience profile is critical.
Third, the key to achieving the needed experience profile
over time is maintaining an adequate flow of people into and
through the force over time. We have done this with the so-
called ``up or out'' promotion system. While there are many
ways such a system can be managed, there must be a way of
ensuring sufficient turnover to constantly revitalize the
force. The flow out of the force should not be just at the end
of a career. Our enlisted and officer personnel need to
progress or leave. They must not be allowed to stagnate in
place.
Fourth, the one thing that distinguishes the military
personnel system from our private sector or our government
civilian personnel system is we have the tools needed to
maintain the required personnel profile over time. Some have
argued that we should institute a system that allows people to
stay in place as long as they adequately perform in their jobs.
The ultimate example of such a system is our current civilian
personnel system, but I don't know anyone who thinks that that
system has been so successful it should be the model for the
military. For our military, if servicemembers do not advance,
they must be sent home to make room for the next generation,
because it is the next generation and the one that comes after
that that will carry the fight in the future.
Fifth, many of today's critics warn of a brain drain,
projecting that some may claim--and they--some claim many
bright young people will leave the military frustrated because
of the service are not making the appropriate use of their
talents. However, the more significant issue is the larger
drain that is the systematic expulsion of talented officers
who, regardless of experience and skills, who are forced out at
30 years of service or those who leave earlier than 30 years of
service, anticipating that they will be forced out at 30--at
the 30-year mark, which generally equates to a chronicle--
chronological age at about 52 or in the early 50s. I've written
extensively about this problem and, even when I was Under
Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, tried to
address this, but to no avail.
Sixth, and lastly, it might seem strange to you for me to
be arguing that we must maintain the flow of personnel through
the military just as I'm saying that in select areas we should
extend careers. But, I assure you that there is nothing
contradictory in what I am proposing. Today, DOPMA gives us a
one-size-fits-all personnel system for officers. While we can
manage different occupational groups separately in what is
called ``competitive categories,'' the career structure for
each category is the same. To me, that makes no sense. Without
arguing the merits of longer careers for the combat arms, I am
certain that our specialty corps, such as intelligence,
medical, chaplain, acquisition, and many more, including, in
the future, cyber, do not need to adhere to the standard DOPMA
structure of promotion timing, opportunity, and tenure, which
reflects our thinking about youth and vigor in the 1940s.
To summarize this quick overview of reforming the military
personnel system, here are a few points that I think this
committee should keep in mind: keep your eye on the future,
particularly what changes will do to the experience profile of
the force; maintain the desired experience profile over time;
ensure adequate flow of personnel; maintain the basic concept
of ``up or out"; be as flexible and permissive as possible to
allow the services to better manage the assignment of people;
and then lengthen careers beyond 30 years of service,
particularly for specialty corps.
Thank you for allowing me to testify before you today, and
I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Rostker follows:]
The Prepared Statement by Bernard D. Rostker \1\
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\1\ The opinions and conclusions expressed in this testimony are
the author's alone and should not be interpreted as representing those
of RAND or any of the sponsors of its research. This product is part of
the RAND Corporation testimony series. RAND testimonies record
testimony presented by RAND associates to federal, state, or local
legislative committees; government-appointed commissions and panels;
and private review and oversight bodies. The RAND Corporation is a
nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and
effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and
private sectors around the world. RAND's publications do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
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reforming the american military officer personnel system \2\
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\2\ This testimony is available for free download at http://
www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies/CT446.html.
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The military personnel system in place today is fundamentally the
same one put into place after World War II, with minor modifications
for officers provided by the passage of the Defense Officer Personnel
Management Act of 1980, or DOPMA. Many, including myself, have argued
that this system is outdated--reflecting industrial-age thinking in the
information age--and point to what they see as a drain of talent. The
fundamental problem that most can agree on is that a one-size-fits-all
system cannot provide the range of competencies that will be needed in
the future. However, what a new system might look like is far from
settled.
Recent books and magazine articles include critiques of the current
system that call for a new regime. These publications are replete with
stories of frustrated bright young people leaving the military because
the services both force them into assignments that they do not think
make appropriate use of their talents and require them to adhere to a
rigid path of advancement that is inflexible. The favorite villain in
this story is the so-called up-or-out promotion system. While these
stories are individually compelling and collectively paint a bleak
picture of the future of the American military, they generally come up
short in describing how an alternative system might operate or how
eliminating up-or-out might produce the desired force of the future--
or, for that matter, what the desired force of the future should even
look like. What is needed is an understanding of the current system,
how it operates, and what needs to be changed. To use an old cliche, we
must not throw the baby out with the bath water.
It is important to recognize that there are at least two places
where talented individuals are leaving the military: There is the oft-
cited exodus of junior officers (although many talented individuals
choose to stay), but there is also the less-cited systematic exodus of
officers--not only those who are forced out at 30 years of commissioned
service regardless of experience and skills, but also those who leave
before that, anticipating that they will be forced out at 30 years of
service. Given the way officers are commissioned through the military
academies or through ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps], this
generally equates to forcing out officers who are in their early
fifties. It is important to note that the way we lose junior officers
is largely because of the way the assignment system is managed, but the
way we lose talented senior officers largely has to do with the way the
personnel system is designed. The ability to address the retention
problem among junior officers is largely in the hands of the services
and the way they manage assignment; addressing the retention of senior
officers means Congress would have to consider whether it would change
the way careers are structured.
procedural changes in the assignment system
Today's critics charge that the services' central personnel
assignment system is a failure because it neither adequately recognizes
the special attributes an individual can bring to a job nor takes
individual preferences into account; further, it does not provide all
candidates an equal chance of being assigned to the positions most
important to advancement. Critics maintain that a decentralized system
where each candidate could self-nominate for any job and is eligible
for all jobs would better foster the principles of talent management.
Let's look at these claims in some detail.
knowing what's needed
The military's human resource management system is actually made up
of two complementary systems most often managed by two different
organizations: one that focuses on job or billet requirements (most
often referred to as the manpower system), and another that focuses on
providing qualified people who meet the specifications laid out by the
manpower system (most often referred to as the personnel system). The
assignment system is the bridge between the two as it tries to put the
right face in the right space. Any special attributes possessed by an
individual service member--often referred to as his/her knowledge,
skills, and abilities (KSA) or competencies--may make little difference
in his/her assignment unless these attributes are recognized in the job
or billet description. In a small number of cases, information about a
service member that is not on the record but is known to senior
personnel may be taken into account, but for the vast majority of
officers, the match is made based upon the stated job description.
Therefore, the first requirement for better matching the unique
qualities of young officers is for the services to expand the range and
improve the specificity of attributes that are included as part of a
job description.
Expanding job descriptions, however, is problematic, with the
Army's recent Green-Pages proof-of-concept pilot test serving as a
clear example. The pilot tested a largely decentralized assignment
system, where individuals presented themselves for reassignment and
units advertised their opening to improve matches. That was the way it
was supposed to operate, at least. In actuality, the pilot test showed
that units required ``a great deal of follow-up encouragement,'' and
even with all the encouragement that resulted from this being a pilot
test, half of the officers who participated thought that the job
information was ``too sparse.'' There are many reasons that units fail
to differentiate jobs adequately, but little progress can be made until
the services better articulate what is required and what skills will be
needed in the future. Two examples may illustrate this point. A former
Air Force personnel chief recently recounted how he was told that the
Air Force needed more officers with STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Math) backgrounds, at a time when there were more STEM
qualified officers then there were billets to which they could be
assigned. Assuming that that Air Force did, in fact, need more officers
with STEM backgrounds, this need must be reflected in the descriptions
of Air Force jobs to have any validity for recruiting new personnel.
Similarly, the Army's senior commander in Europe recently discussed his
need for more soldiers who could speak Russian and other eastern
European languages. The system can only respond, however, if such a
need is translated into job requirements.
accommodating individual preferences
Meeting the assignment preferences of individual service members
can be challenging, and all too often, the process appears to force
people into assignments that they don't want. One often hears that
there are less-desirable jobs that must be filled and the assignment
systems must fair-share them among the entire force. But this fair-
sharing approach doesn't take service member preferences into account.
The Navy, for example, has found a way to compensate volunteers for
such jobs by allowing qualified sailors to bid for these jobs, with the
winning bidder being the one willing to take the smallest cash bonus to
fill the position. Recent research at RAND \3\ has shown that a similar
auction system could be used to induce members to extend in place in
overseas assignments. Nevertheless, the services have been slow in
taking up such incentives and ideas to help them sort out the
assignment system and gain the potential to satisfy assignment
requirements while making service members better off by aligning
assignments with preferences. More can be done.
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\3\ Craig A. Bond, Jennifer Lamping Lewis, Henry Leonard, Julia
Pollak, Christopher Guo and Bernard Rostker, Tour Lengths, Permanent
Changes of Station, and Alternatives for Savings and Improved
Stability, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, RR-1034-OSD, 2015.
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opening up assignments for all?
Another often-heard complaint is that the current system does not
consider all qualified service members for all jobs, including the most
critical and career-enhancing jobs. But one can challenge whether the
assignment system should do this. While I am sure there are ways to
improve the visibility of the talents of all members of the force, the
plain fact is there are fewer positions at the top than there are at
the bottom. Moreover, in order to ensure that future leaders gain the
experience they will need later in their careers, the services must
assign critical jobs to those judged to have the best chance for
advancement. This is done today in both a formal and informal way.
Formally, there are critical gateway selection boards for schools,
or for qualifying for certain positions, such as command of a ship.
More important, however, is an informal system of mentorships where
senior leaders (generally from a particular occupational group or
community) ``sponsor'' junior officers, who then are given specific
assignments to help shape their careers for advancement. I am most
familiar with the way it works in the Navy, where leaders identify
those young members considered among the most promising and guide their
careers so they gain experience that will facilitate their performance
if and when they become senior leaders. The system works well for those
who find a sponsor, but some will be left behind. Getting into this
group usually requires impressing a senior officer so that he will work
the system to give his protege the best assignments, but falling out of
this group is easy if a junior officer fails to perform as expected.
The Army, on the other hand, traditionally has been more
egalitarian in managing assignments. Some have argued that this better
allows the talent to rise to the top, and is fairer about giving
everyone a chance at critical assignments. However, research going back
to the 1960s suggests that some very talented people leave under such a
system because they cannot see a clear path for advancement and do not
want to leave their careers to chance. They believe they are special
and expect to have their careers managed accordingly.
structural changes in the design of military careers
For a long time, I have argued and written about the need to reform
the career military structure by increasing the maximum years of
service an officer might serve to 40, for the reasons I will discuss
here. That said, I first want to sound a cautionary note by endorsing
the fundamental principle of the up-or-out system and explaining why
such a system is critical to ensuring the vitality and viability of our
military personnel system for the future.
the thirty-years-of-service career limitation
A key feature of the officer military personnel system as laid out
in law under the DOPMA is the 30-years-of-service cap for all officers
who are not promoted to General or Flag rank, O-7. I am aware that
under DOPMA, the service Secretaries can establish special continuation
boards to extend the service of O-5 and O-6 officers beyond mandatory
retirement for up to five years or until age 62, but this is almost
never done. For all intents and purposes, we operate under a career cap
of 30 years of commissioned service.
Given that most officers come from the service academies or ROTC,
entering college at 18 years of age and commissioned at 22 years of
age, this means that, with the exception of those promoted to O-7, most
career officers have left the service before age 52. This is true
regardless of an officer's specialty because DOPMA is a one-size-fits-
all personnel system for officers. While DOPMA allows for the promotion
of different occupational groups separately in what are called
``competitive categories,'' the career structure for each category is
the same. To me, this makes no sense. Without arguing the merits of
longer careers for the combat arms, I am certain that our specialty
corps--such as intelligence, medical, chaplains, acquisition, and many
more, including any future cyber corps--would benefit if they were not
compelled to adhere to the standard DOPMA structure of promotion
timing, opportunity, and tenure. The case of intelligence corps,
described here, illustrates why the 30-year limitation should be
changed.
Aside from the needs of specific occupational groups where
experience is particularly important, a general case can be made that
limiting careers to 30 years of commissioned service is out of line
with efforts to broaden the experiences of officers as they progress
through their careers. In 1987, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nicholas
Act, which recognized the expeditionary and inherently joint nature of
how military forces operate and established the requirement that
officers complete the requisite joint professional military education
and joint assignments before they could be considered for promotion to
general or flag rank. Accordingly, officers start to be ``jointed''
after their tenth year of service, when they are promoted to O-4, and
usually try to complete this over the next ten to 12 years. These are
also the years that officers destined for leadership positions have
their command assignments. In effect, the Goldwater-Nicholas Act added
between four and five years of additional must-have assignments to an
already full career and squeezed out the time officers would have spent
on their service staffs learning how to manage the enterprise. I am
particularly sensitive to this unexpected cost of Goldwater-Nicholas,
having served for many years at a senior level in the Navy and Army
secretariats. While we may have made better joint warriors, it came at
the cost of having less-experienced uniformed managers of the services.
This was a cost that could have been avoided if career length had been
extended commensurate with the expanded career content resulting from
Goldwater-Nicholas.
This situation I describe is only going to get worse with the new
programs recently announced by the Secretary of Defense designed to
increase the opportunities for assignments with industry and expanded
opportunities for advanced education. We need to ask, ``What sense does
it make to broaden the experiences of our officer corps and then
provide little opportunity to reap the benefits of that broadening by
truncating careers at 30 years of commissioned service?'' In my
judgment, it is imperative to lengthen careers to accommodate all these
career-broadening opportunities.
I note that the issue of career length is not new, as the following
review of the legislative history on this issue will show. The 30-year
career has been in place since 1947, but even back then, members of
Congress were not comfortable with limiting careers to 30 years of
commissioned service. Finally, knowing the Committee's concern about
the cost of personnel, I would like to review how extending the career
length limit might have a positive impact on reducing the overall cost
of personnel.
a historical view of the thirty-years-of-service career limit
As the Senate considered the passage of the Military Personnel Act
of 1947, some in Congress expressed concern that the new system would
``force the retirement of officers at the height of their usefulness,''
and would be ``very detrimental to the best interests of the country.''
Sen. Guy Cordon, R-Texas, did the math and figured that ``the
retirement of colonels after they have completed five years of service
. . . or 30 years of service, whichever is the later . . . would mean
that the average officer, figuring that he received his commission at
age 22, would be forced to retire at 52 years of age.'' The record
shows that Sen. Wayne Morse, R-Ore., concluded that he could ``not vote
for the bill unless those objections are taken care of,'' and Sen.
Harry Flood Byrd, D-Va., commented that this ``seems to me mighty early
to retire a man, at 52.'' The Army countered the concerns of the three
senators by arguing that Sen. Cordon had gotten the math wrong because
The statement that the average officer receives his commission
at 22 and would be retired at 52 is in error. The average age
at appointment of Army officers is 25. For years to come, the
average officer will not reach the grade of colonel before he
has had 28 years of service . . . Therefore, the average age of
colonels will be 58 . . . The question of proper retirement
ages must be a compromise between the desires of the
individuals for longer service and the needs of the Nation for
a vital Army . . . Without a flow of promotions, there must be
stagnation. There cannot be a flow of promotions without forced
attrition at the top. \4\
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\4\ Dwight Eisenhower, et al., ``Officer Personnel Act of 1947,''
testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, 1947.
Of course, it was the Army that got it wrong, but how wrong did not
become clear until the system was in operation for some time and it
became obvious that it was the rare officer who waited until 30 years
of service to retire. The incentive in the new system was to take
advantage of the reduced pension that paid immediately for voluntary
retirements after 20 years of service and move on to start a second
career before it was too late to do so.
In 1954, the question of early voluntary retirements so alarmed
Congress that an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act of that
year, the so-called Van Zandt amendment, limited voluntary retirements.
It was repealed when the Officer Grade Limitation Act was passed, but
only after Congress received assurances from the military services that
``the privilege of voluntary retirement after completion of 20 or more
years of service will be exercised little'' because ``the services have
long accepted 30 years of faithful service as being the normal tour of
duty.'' \5\ The force reductions after the Korean War saw extensive use
of the 20-year option to draw down the force. By 1980, when DOPMA
passed Congress, the 20-year volunteer retirement had become so common
that it was no longer considered to be at the discretion of the
Secretary of the Military Department, but had become a ``right'' and
was so reflected in the new legislation.
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\5\ ``Officer Grade Limitation Act of 1954 (H.R. 7103),'' Senate
Committee on Armed Services hearing transcript, Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1954, p. 8.
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the need for longer careers for intelligence officers
The career area of military intelligence is a prime example of how
today's one-size-fit-all system is not serving us well. The
requirements for intelligence professionals, particularly the
intelligence officers who serve in the National Intelligence Program,
are well articulated by the Army in its description of the ``unique
functions'' performed by the Strategic Intelligence Functional Area
officers, attached at the end of my statement.
Our study of the current state of military intelligence shows that
today's military personnel system is ill-suited to produce the kind and
number of officers needed by the intelligence community. \6\
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\6\ Charles Nemfakos, Bernard D. Rostker, Raymond E. Conley,
Stephanie Young, William A. Williams, Jeffrey Engstrom, Barbara
Bicksler, Sara Beth Elson, Joseph Jenkins, Lianne Kennedy-Boudali, and
Donald Temple, Workforce Planning in the Intelligence Community, Santa
Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, RR-114-ODNI, 2013, pp.51-73.
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Today's system is built on the paradigm of youth and vigor. It is
not designed to produce the personnel with the kind of training and
experiences that are required of today's intelligence professionals.
The grade table that drives the system reflects the needs of combat
units, not the needs of the interagency intelligence community. The
DOPMA tenure and retirement rules truncate and terminate military
careers just when intelligence officers have gained the experience
necessary to make them truly productive. The best that can be said is
that many former intelligence personnel continue to serve as government
employees and contractors. Changing this system will require statutory
relief to allow the services to retain personnel with demonstrated
professional intelligence expertise and experience beyond current
mandatory retirement dates. The best way to address this problem is to
build a career profile based on the paradigm of ``experience and
performance.'' Given the general structure of DOPMA and working within
the constructs of a competitive category, this could be accomplished by
providing grade relief, ceiling relief, and end-strength relief. Grade
relief would allow the services to better match the service member with
the positions that need to be filled; ceiling relief would allow
officers who are not promoted to the grade of O-7 to serve longer than
the current limit of 30 years of service; and end-strength relief would
mean that if the overall requirements for intelligence officers
exceeded those authorized today, there would be no need to reduce the
number of officers serving in other occupations to accommodate any
increase in the number of intelligence officers serving. All this,
however, must be done within (and adhering to) the basic concept of up-
or-out.
the importance of maintaining the up-or-out system
The first imperative when considering changes to today's personnel
system is to examine the impact on the experience profile of the force
ten and 20 years in the future. For the vast majority of our military
workforce, the people we recruit today will be the journeymen we need
ten years from now and the leaders we have 20 years from now. In some
specialty areas, new programs of lateral entry may provide added
flexibilities, but the vast majority of military skills will still be
acquired along the path of in-at-the-bottom-up-through-the ranks.
The plain fact is that the military we build today must be capable
of winning wars in the future, but we don't know when those wars might
come. In the aggregate, the year-of-service profile is the best
indicator of the readiness of the force to go to war at any point in
the future. Maintaining the appropriate experience profile is critical.
The key to achieving the desired experience profile is maintaining
an adequate flow of people into and through the force over time. We
have done this with the so-called up-or-out promotion system. While
there are many ways that such a system can be managed, there must be a
way of ensuring sufficient turnover to constantly revitalize the force.
The flow out of the force should not be just at the end of a career.
Our officers need to progress or leave. They must not be allowed to
stagnate in place.
The one thing that distinguishes a military personnel system from
our private sector or our government civilian personnel system is we
have had the tools and use them to maintain the required experience
profile over time. Some have argued that we should institute a system
that allows people to stay in place as long as they perform their job
adequately. In fact, we have done this in the past, specifically during
the drawdown during the early 1990s, and the result was that when we
went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were shortages of critical
midgrade personnel; the same personnel we failed to recruit a decade
earlier. I appreciate how hard it is to tell a young service member who
is doing a good job today and wants nothing more than to be left alone
to continue doing that job that he or she must advance or leave the
service, but that is exactly what we must do to ensure that our force
is always ready. If service members do not advance, they must be sent
home to make room for the next generation because it is the next
generation, and the ones that come after it, that will carry the fight
in the future.
Some might think it strange for me to be arguing that we must
maintain the flow of personnel through the military just as I am
arguing that in selected areas we should extend careers, but I assure
you that there is nothing contradictory in what I am proposing.
Extending careers does not negate the need to move people along in
their careers; it means having different points in time when people
move up or out. It means more time for people to learn their craft,
less turnover, longer tour assignments and more ability to take
advantage of career-broadening opportunities, including those gained
from joint assignments, as well as outside of the military at school
and in assignments with industry.
controlling the cost of military personnel
Finally, I would like to comment on the cost of military personnel.
Military personnel cost more today than in the past because we are
paying them better--and by the way, they have fewer complaints. I don't
believe that we think our military personnel are being underpaid today,
which was a concern when I last served at the Pentagon. In my judgment,
the best way to reduce overall personnel cost in general is to increase
the average years of service we get out of every new recruit or
officer, even as we maintain the appropriate years-of-service
experience profile. I do recognize that, as always, the devil is in the
details and the general argument may not hold for all occupations. It
depends on the costs of accession and training, and on the structure of
pay. In general, however, selectively extending the length of careers
to 40 years of service is likely to be cost-effective. Remember, while
we might pay individual officers more in current military compensation,
there are relatively few of them. Also, as was true when Congress voted
to increase the pay of senior enlisted personnel in 2002, there is a
very positive message sent through the force and we would expect to see
increased retention as service members look forward to the
possibilities of serving for a full career.
summarizing
To summarize this quick overview of reforming the military
personnel system, here are a few points to that I think this committee
should keep in mind:
Keep your eye on the future, particularly what any change
will do to the experience profile of the force in the future.
Maintain the desired experience profile over time.
Ensure adequate flow of personnel; i.e., maintain the
basic up-or-out concept.
Be as flexible and permissive as possible in allowing the
services to manage the assignment of personnel.
Lengthen careers beyond 30 years of service, particularly
for the specialty corps.
[END OF TESTIMONY]
[NEXT IS A DESCRIPTION OF ARMY STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE]
army strategic intelligence \7\
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\7\ Department of the Army, Commissioned Officer Professional
Development and Career Management, Washington, D.C., Department of the
Army Pamphlet 600-3, 2007. P. 251.
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Strategic Intelligence functional area provides a focused,
trained corps of strategic intelligence professionals to Army
organizations, combatant commands, DOD, the Joint Staff, and
interagency communities with tailored intelligence required for
the development of national security policy and theater
strategic plans and operations. The Strategic Intelligence
officer acts as the premier expert on strategic and global
intelligence activities that accomplish U.S. strategic
objectives developed through unique training, education, and
recurring assignments at theater, national, Joint, DOD, and
interagency communities. The Strategic Intelligence officer
translates national security strategy into intelligence
strategies. Providing premier intelligence in a strategic
context, the Strategic Intelligence officer enables
decisionmakers and warfighters to dominate the battlespace. The
Strategic Intelligence officer represents Army interests at the
Joint and interagency communities. Strategic Intelligence
officers work primarily at echelons above corps worldwide.
[They fill positions] in intelligence units, headquarters,
national agencies, and unified commands. Strategic Intelligence
officers . . . participate in all phases of the intelligence
cycle. The Strategic Intelligence officer is an agile,
national- and theater-level and interagency expert--who leads,
plans, and directs all-source analysis, intelligence systems,
and intelligence policy and programs--supporting key
decisionmakers, policymakers, and warfighters in an
interagency, joint, coalition, and combined environment.
Exercising broad responsibility and authority, the Strategic
Intelligence officer is capable of integrating interagency
activities and interacting with the foreign intelligence
services to produce predictive strategic intelligence to advise
policymakers and combatant commanders to deliver overwhelming
advantage to our warfighters, defense planners, and national
security policymakers.
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
Mr. Hale.
STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT F. HALE, FELLOW, BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON
Dr. Hale. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Reed,
members of the committee.
I'll focus today on two broad issues: military
compensation, or slowing its growth as free money for
readiness, and also some selected personnel issues.
Let me just say, I appear here as a former Comptroller and
as an individual, not necessarily representing my current
organization.
Let me turn first to compensation. As a share of the total
DOD budget, military compensation has stayed roughly constant
since 2000. It's up a couple of percentage points, but not
much. But, those constant percentages mask important shifts. As
the DOD budget grew sharply after 9/11, compensation costs grew
with it, fueled by increases in healthcare costs and also pay
raises. As the budgets then turned down in 2010, the Department
sought to slow the growth in military compensation. It made
this decision not to alter, not to shoot for any particular
percentage, but, rather, to free up funds to sustain readiness
and modernization, but particularly readiness. And the proposed
compensation reforms also sought to modernize the compensation
system and make it more effective.
Now, conventional wisdom holds that the Congress turned the
Department down almost all of its--with regard to almost all of
its requests. In fact, Congress approved a number of DOD
proposals, including initiatives to slow growth and payments to
healthcare providers, to raise care--TRICARE fees modestly, to
reform pharmaceutical copays, and others. Congress even took
the lead on some issues, principally military retirement
reform.
Taken together, these changes reduced DOD costs by about $6
billion a year, freeing up substantial funds to help the
Department return toward full-spectrum readiness. I think the
Congress deserves more credit than it gets, and principal
credit--or significant credit certainly goes to this committee.
But, the job's not done. Further efforts to reform
compensation and slow the growth to free up funds need to take
into account the recruiting and retention climate, which
obviously is tightened. But, the key candidate for future
reform is the military healthcare system, as the Chairman said
in his opening remarks. The current system often requires
copays that are zero, or nearly so, which can lead to overuse
of care. And the system's costly to administer. And also,
despite some overuse of care, there's substantial
underutilization in military healthcare facilities, which
results in wasteful spending. And finally, there are access and
quality issues.
Congress has before it two proposals, a DOD proposal for
several years, and then the one from the Military Compensation
and Retirement Modernization Commission. The DOD proposal would
certainly be the easiest to implement. It would result in some
modernization and savings. And, I might add, more than three-
quarters of the savings in DOD proposals--in the DOD proposal
comes not from the pockets of the beneficiaries, but from more
selective use of care and from the reductions in the cost to
administer the system.
The Commission version offers beneficiaries a choice, and
that is certainly a substantial advantage and, I think,
warrants a careful look, but it isn't clear, at least to me,
how the system--how the Commission proposal would maintain the
system of military treatment facilities, which must remain in
place, in some degree, to train future healthcare providers for
war. And so, I think significant further work would be needed
before you could enact the Commission proposal.
In sum, the military personnel system has received
substantial attention in recent years, and needs continued
attention, but I am more concerned about the system that DOD
manage--uses to manage its career civilian employees. Listening
to debates over civilians, I sometimes feel like critics
believe that the 775,000 DOD civilians mostly work at the
Pentagon, maybe making PowerPoint slides or testimony. In fact,
about 80 percent of them work outside
the Washington, D.C., area, they perform many necessary
support functions, they fix some DOD weapons, they teach
military kids, they provide military healthcare, they manage
bases.
The system that recruits, retains, and manages these
civilians has major problems. I'm not in a position to offer a
comprehensive assessment or reforms, but let me use my
experience in DOD to offer a couple of ideas:
First, it takes too long to hire civilians. The Chairman
mentioned this in his opening remarks. This committee made a
start by granting expedited hiring authority for acquisition
professionals. You might want to consider expanding that. One
group that would come to my mind is professionals with
expertise in the--and experience in the audit of financial
statements.
Poor performers are another issue. DOD has a small
proportion of career civilian employees who do not perform
well. Executives working for me spent way too long disciplining
and, when needed, attempting to terminate members of this
relatively small group. Most recent authorization legislation
makes a start here, allowing performance to be considered in
RIF [Reduction in Force] actions and expanding the probationary
employment to 2 year--period of employment to 2 years. It is a
good start. But, DOD and Congress might consider establishing
review points throughout a career when poor performance can
lead to termination. Some safeguards would be needed, but they
have to be more streamlined than the onerous safeguards and
lengthy proceedings that are required today.
Let me also briefly address the requirements for civilians.
Civilian personnel needs, in my experience, tend to be
established job by job, making it hard to debate what numbers
and types of civilian employees are needed in the aggregate as
warfighting and support needs change. We have much better
information to debate the numbers needed of the military.
Even in the--so, I think Congress should challenge DOD to
provide a better basis for determining, in the aggregate, the
number and types of civilians that are needed to meet
warfighting requirements--but, even in the absence of improved
requirement tools, it's clear that DOD needs to reduce the size
of its civilian workforce, but it needs to do so in a way that
allows it to continue to meet support needs. Some key steps
that would permit that require congressional support, including
contentious ones, like permission to close unneeded military
facilities where a lot of civilians work, and to downsize or
close some military treatment facilities.
Finally, in my view, we employ too many sticks and not
enough carrots in dealing with our career civilians. In recent
years, we've furloughed civilians twice, we've frozen their pay
three times. Some in Congress criticize career civilians,
seemingly treating them not as valued employees, but, rather,
as symbols of a government that they believe is too large.
DOD and Congress need to provide more rewards for good
performance--a few more carrots, if you will. Let me suggest a
couple of actions:
Today, many career civil servants who are selected as
members of the Senior Executive Service [SES] receive little or
no increase in salary, even though their responsibilities grow
sharply. And I might add, in my experience, it discourages good
people from considering taking SES roles.
Press support or reports suggest the administration is
considering trying to increase SES pay, at least to the minimum
level of GS-15 [General Schedule]. That would be an incremental
step, but one I like better as an incremental step would be for
DOD and Congress to expand the proportion of SES performers who
are eligible for presidential rank awards, perhaps focusing on
the awards at the meritorious level. These rank awards are made
competitively through board selections. They offer both
prestige and some substantial financial rewards. And what I
like about them is that they direct the rewards to the SES
members who are performing exceptionally well.
Finally, DOD and Congress need to harness the power of
praise as a way to recognize the importance of DOD's career
civilian employees. We're very good at recognizing the
accomplishments of the military. And that should continue.
While I served as Comptroller, I always tried to thank the
men and women in uniform and the civilians who support them. I
hope more senior leaders will do that regularly. And DOD, along
with this committee and others in Congress, could help by
seeking opportunities to recognize the successes of civilian
employees. Greater recognition would acknowledge the important
role that DOD civilians play in maintaining our Nation's
security, and it would help civilians feel that they are,
indeed, valued employees.
Throughout my government career, I have been privileged to
serve with many highly capable DOD personnel, civilian and
military. I hope the thoughts I've offered today can play a
small role in helping these men and women who do so much to
support our national security.
With that, I'll stop, Mr. Chairman, and join in questions
at the right time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hale follows:]
The Prepared Statement by Hon. Robert F. Hale
I appreciate the opportunity to testify on Department of Defense
(DOD) personnel issues. DOD is one of the largest employers in the
United States, and the military compensation system is one of the most
complex. Given this size and complexity, I cannot address all of the
issues related to DOD personnel. Instead I will focus on two issues:
efforts to reform and slow growth in the costs of military compensation
and selected civilian personnel issues.
reforming and slowing growth in costs of military compensation
As a share of the total DOD budget, military compensation costs
have remained roughly constant since 2000. But the constant percentages
mask important shifts. As DOD budgets grew sharply after 9/11,
compensation costs also grew sharply. Health care costs, especially for
the new TRICARE for Life program, caused much of this growth. But
substantial increases in basic pay, along with increases in basic
allowance for housing to eliminate out-of-pocket costs, also fueled
growth.
Past Success in Reform and Slowing Growth. After 2010 total defense
budgets began to decline, and DOD faced legal limits on its total
funding put in place in 2011. In response, the Department sought to
slow the growth in the costs of military compensation. It made that
decision, not to alter the percentage of funding devoted to
compensation, but rather to maintain recruiting and retention while
freeing up funds to sustain modernization and, importantly, readiness.
As the military ended most of its large-scale combat operations in Iraq
and Afghanistan, regaining full-spectrum readiness required added
funds. Proposed compensation reforms sought to help meet readiness
needs while also modernizing the compensation system and making it more
effective.
Conventional wisdom holds that Congress refused most of DOD's
requests for changes in laws needed to alter the military compensation
system. While Congress did turn down some DOD requests, it approved a
number of them and even took the lead on key issues. Examples of key
enacted changes over the past five years include:
[Questions for the record with answers supplied follow:]
Health care changes. The Administration permitted DOD to
use the federal ceiling price for pharmaceuticals, which substantially
reduced DOD costs. Congress permitted DOD to use Medicare rates to
reimburse for outpatient care and care at small hospitals. It also
agreed to modest increases in fees for retirees who use TRICARE.
Finally, Congress permitted DOD to restructure and increase
pharmaceutical co-pays in ways that steered beneficiaries toward more
cost effective approaches such as generics and mail order delivery.
Congress even went beyond DOD requests and mandated use of mail-order
delivery for follow-on pharmaceuticals.
Pay raise limits. For the past three years the President
has exercised his existing authority to limit military basic pay raises
below the levels that would have been mandated by the private-sector
formula. Because basic pay makes up a large share of compensation,
these limits contributed significantly to freeing up funding for
rediness and, to date, have permitted the military to recruit and
retain needed personnel.
Military retirement. This year Congress took the lead in
reforming the military retirement system to provide military members
with a new 401(k)-like fund that includes matching government
contributions while also reducing the size of pensions for future
retirees who serve 20 or more years. The changes will reduce DOD
accrual costs for military retirement.
Taken together, these changes reduced the DOD costs for military
compensation by more than $6 billion a year. These savings, which will
continue in perpetuity unless they have to be reversed to meet
recruiting and retention needs, did not come close to offsetting the
large reductions in DOD funding mandated by the Budget Control Act of
2011 and other decisions. However, the compensation changes made
available significant funds for readiness and achieved some needed
modernization, especially for the military retirement system.
Importantly, even after slowing growth in compensation, DOD has so far
been able to recruit and retain needed personnel--the key goal for the
military compensation system.
Job Not Done. Despite these notable successes, further efforts to
reform compensation and slow the growth of costs should be undertaken.
DOD and Congress must proceed carefully to ensure that, in the face of
improvements in the economy, the Department can still recruit and
retain needed personnel. So long as that goal is met, further reform
efforts can lead to a more effective compensation system and free up
funds to support readiness and modernization.
As part of these efforts, continued limits on the size of basic pay
raises may be appropriate if the recruiting and retention climate
permits. Limits on basic pay raises free up substantial funds, some of
which could be used to offset the costs the compensation proposals that
may result from the next version of the Force of the Future
initiatives. Media reports suggest that, as part of the next tranche of
initiatives, DOD is considering changes in the basic pay table to
increase incentives for retention of mid-grade officers and for persons
with specialized skills. These types of flexibility almost always make
the military pay system more effective and should be given careful
consideration. Changes in out-of-pocket costs for basic allowance for
housing and reduction in the commissary subsidy may also be
appropriate.
The key candidate for future reform is the military health care
system. The current system often imposes co-pays that are zero or
nearly zero, which tends to lead to overuse of care. The system is also
costly to administer. In the TRICARE portion of the system, the share
of costs borne by beneficiaries has fallen well below the levels
Congress mandated when TRICARE was established. Nor are benefit issues
the only problem. Despite some overuse of care, there is substantial
underutilization in military health care facilities, which results in
wasteful spending.
For the past several years, DOD has proposed revisions that would
modernize the TRICARE system and make it more effective. Changes
including combining the three major TRICARE plans into one plan and
imposing modest co-pays when retirees and active-duty dependents seek
treatment (care for active-duty personnel would remain free). The co-
pays are designed to reduce overuse of health care and to provide more
incentives for use of military treatment facilities in order to improve
utilization. Once fully implemented, the reforms proposed by DOD would
save roughly a billion dollars a year. More than three quarters of
these savings would result, not from greater payments by beneficiaries,
but rather from reductions in administrative costs and more selective
use of health care. Imposing fees for new entrants into the TRICARE for
Life plan, along with additional changes in pharmaceutical co pays
designed in part to steer beneficiaries toward generic medicines, would
generate substantial additional savings.
In its 2015 report, the Military Compensation and Retirement
Modernization Commission recommended a much different approach to
reform of the military health care system. The Commission approach
would provide military personnel with an allowance for health care that
beneficiaries could use to select from a menu of health care plans. The
Commission's proposal offers beneficiaries a choice of health care
plans, a significant advantage. Also, in part because the Commission
proposed that retirees pay substantially more for health care, the
Commission proposal saves a large amount of money--more than $6 billion
a year once it is fully implemented, according to estimates in the
Commission report.
While the Commission proposal offers substantial advantages, it is
not clear how the system of military treatment facilities, which must
remain in place to train health care professionals for war, would be
maintained. Significant further work is needed, perhaps along with a
carefully designed pilot program, before the Commission plan could be
implemented.
In addition to some version of these reforms, Congress needs to
permit the military services to downsize or close underutilized
military treatment facilities so long as reasonable patient care can be
maintained and training needs met. For their part, the military
services need to propose appropriate downsizing as part of the overall
effort to maintain quality health care while holding down costs.
Finally, as it reviews the health care system, Congress needs to
address other issues such as access to care.
In sum, DOD and Congress have made important progress in reforming
military compensation. This progress has freed up substantial funds
that have been used to maintain readiness and modernization in the
military while still allowing the services to meet recruiting and
retention needs. Further reforms are needed, including consideration of
changes proposed by the Force of the Future Initiatives and--
importantly--reform of the military health care system.
selected civilian personnel issues
The military personnel system needs continued attention. But I am
more concerned about problems in the system DOD uses to manage its
career civilian employees. DOD employs about 775,000 civilians who
provide support that is critical to the Department's ability to
maintain national security. Listening to debates over civilians, I
sometimes feel that critics believe that most DOD civilians work at the
Pentagon. In fact about 80 percent of DOD civilians work outside of the
Washington DC area. They fix some DOD weapons, run the Department's
training ranges, and manage DOD bases. They provide health care for
military personnel and teach their children. They also perform many
other necessary support functions.
The system that recruits, retains, and manages these civilian
employees has major problems. However, compared to the military system,
it gets much less attention in DOD and Congress. This relative
inattention occurs in part because career civilians work in agencies
throughout government. DOD tends to defer to the Office of Personnel
Management and other government-wide organizations when civilian issues
arise. DOD, however, employs about half of all career civilians in the
federal government. Because of their numbers and their importance in
maintaining an effective warfighting force, I believe that the
Department needs to take a leading role in improving the civil service
system, as does this Committee and other defense committees.
I have neither the time nor the expertise to provide a
comprehensive assessment of DOD's civilian personnel system and its
problems. However, during my 12 years of service as a senior DOD
leader, I supervised many DOD civilian employees. Based on that
experience, several problems stand out:
Hiring problems. It takes too long to hire career
civilian employees. Organizations that I oversaw as DOD comptroller
(including the Defense Contract Audit Agency and the Defense Finance
and Accounting Service) hired numerous civilian employees--many of whom
were just beginning their careers. These organizations lost qualified
candidates because private-sector firms could hire much more quickly.
Problems handling poor performers. DOD has a small
proportion of career civilian employees who do not perform well.
Executives working for me spent too much time disciplining and, when
needed, attempting to terminate members of this relatively small group.
Lack of tools to set requirements and manage pay. We have
reasonable tools to help determine the numbers and types of military
personnel needed to meet warfighting needs, or at least to generate
information needed for an informed debate. We also have good tools to
ascertain how military personnel will react to changes in compensation.
Civilian personnel needs, however, tend to be established job by job,
making it hard to debate what numbers and types of civilian employees
are needed in the aggregate as warfighting and support requirements
change. Also, we have almost no tools that permit us to judge how
civilians will react to compensation changes.
Too many sticks, too few carrots. In recent years we have
furloughed civilian employees twice and frozen their pay three times.
Some in Congress criticize career civilians, seemingly treating them
not as valued employees but rather as symbols of a government they feel
is too large. We also often fail to recognize the contributions that
civilians make to meeting DOD's warfighting needs. In contrast, we
regularly recognize the accomplishments of our military personnel.
Because of these various problems, morale has fallen sharply among
career civilians. Each year the Partnership for Public Service creates
a morale index for career civilians using questions administered by the
Office of Personnel Management during an annual survey. Between 2010
and 2014, the index suggests that morale for the government's civilian
employees declined by about 12 percent, even while recent improvements
in the economy led to morale improvements among all U.S. workers.
Employees perform best when they believe that their employer values
their services and will treat them fairly. Today, unfortunately, I
believe that many career civilians in DOD, and probably in other
federal agencies, wonder whether their employer really values their
services.
I am not able to offer a comprehensive package of solutions to
these and other problems affecting DOD's career civilian employees (and
in many cases, civilian employees throughout government). I am hopeful
that in future releases, Secretary Carter's Force of the Future
Initiatives will include recommendations for improvements in the
civilian personnel system. I trust that any proposals that are
submitted to Congress will receive careful consideration.
While I can't offer comprehensive reform, I have found during my
government service that progress often has to occur in increments. So I
will conclude my statement by proposing some incremental improvements
that seem practical to me and should help improve the civilian
personnel system.
Congress should challenge DOD to provide a better basis for
determining, in the aggregate, the number and types of civilians needed
to support warfighting requirements. Requiring a one-year study by
DOD's personnel experts, perhaps coupled with an analytic organization
within DOD, seems to me a good place to start. In return for better
tools, Congress should stop requiring cuts in civilian personnel that
are proportional to military reductions. Proportional cuts rarely
permit DOD to meet its support needs.
Even in the absence of better tools to establish requirements, it
is clear that DOD needs to take steps to reduce the size of its
civilian workforce while continuing to meet support needs. Some key
steps require Congressional support. Permitting DOD to close unneeded
military bases, and to downsize or close some military medical
facilities, would help DOD begin to achieve needed civilian personnel
reductions without harming needed support activities.
It is also clear that DOD needs to hire more younger employees.
Today DOD civilian employees under age 35 represent less than one-fifth
of the Department's career civilian workforce. Media and other reports
suggest that future Force of the Future Initiatives will include
specific initiatives to attract more millennials into the Department. I
hope that is true and that the Department (and other agencies) can move
in that direction. In this year's National Defense Authorization Act,
Congress also sought to help by providing expedited hiring authority
for civilian acquisition professionals. As I mentioned earlier, slow
hiring is a key problem in meeting civilian personnel needs. Making
this expedited authority available for other skilled personnel--for
example, for those with skills and experience in the audit of financial
statements--makes sense to me.
Congress and DOD need to work together to help the Department deal
with the relatively small number of poor performing civilians. The most
recent authorization legislation, which permits DOD to take into
account performance during employment cutbacks resulting from
reduction-in-force (RIF) actions, represents a start. Extending the
probationary period for new employees to two years also helps. But
broader authority is needed. DOD and Congress might consider
establishing periodic review points during a career when poor
performance can lead to termination. Some safeguards would of course be
needed to avoid politically motivated or inappropriate separations, but
the safeguards must be sufficiently streamlined to permit terminations
without the impossibly lengthy proceedings that are required today. I
recognize the difficulty of making this change, but I also know it is
needed.
DOD and Congress also need to provide more rewards for good
performance--a few more carrots, if you will. Let me suggest a couple
of actions. Today many career civil servants who are selected as
members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) receive little or no
increase in salary, even though their responsibilities grow sharply.
Comprehensive civilian pay reform, including pay increases for senior
civil servants, would provide the best solution to this problem of pay
compression. But comprehensive pay changes for senior civilians seem
highly unlikely in the current budgetary and political climate. Press
reports suggest that the President is considering an executive order
that would urge increases in SES pay within existing limits. That
action could represent an incremental step toward fixing pay
compression. As another incremental step, DOD and Congress could expand
the proportion of SES performers who are eligible for Presidential rank
awards, perhaps focusing on awards at the meritorious level. These rank
awards, which are made competitively through a process of board
reviews, offer both prestige and substantial financial rewards to SES
members who perform exceptionally well. The expansion should apply to
all federal agencies, not just to DOD.
Along with expansion, the Administration should be strongly
encouraged to remove recent limits on the number of SES members who are
eligible for Presidential rank awards. The Administration imposed these
limits because of concerns about providing awards in tight budget
times, but the limits have the unfortunate effect of reducing
recognition and compensation for the most capable SES members.
Finally, DOD and Congress need to harness the power of praise as a
way to recognize the importance of DOD's career civilian employees. DOD
and Congress are both very good at recognizing the contributions of
military personnel at all ranks, but less good for career civilians.
While I served as DOD Comptroller, I always tried to thank the men and
women in the military, and the civilians who support them. I hope more
senior leaders will do that regularly. DOD, along with this Committee
and others in Congress, could help by seeking opportunities to
recognize the successes of career civilian employees. Greater
recognition would acknowledge the important role that DOD civilians
play in maintaining our nation's security, and it would help civilians
feel that they are valued employees.
Throughout my government career, I have been privileged to serve
with many highly capable DOD personnel--both civilian and military. I
hope the thoughts I have offered today can play a small role in helping
these men and women who do so much to support our national security.
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
Admiral Roughead.
STATEMENT OF ADMIRAL GARY ROUGHEAD, USN [RET.], ANNENBERG
DISTINGUISHED VISITING FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION
Admiral Roughead. Mr. Chairman, Senator Reed, members of
the committee, thank you for the opportunity to share my
thoughts on what I consider to be the most important issue that
needs to be confronted going into the future, and that's
designing the total force and putting in place the policies
that enable us to attract, recruit, and retain the talent
that's going to be so important.
My perspectives are based on command at sea, commanding
both the Atlantic and the Pacific Fleets, serving as a Service
Chief and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving on
combatant commander staffs and on service staffs, commanding a
NATO striking force in the Atlantic, which is a multinational
joint task force, and commanding a joint task force in the
Pacific.
Nothing that I say should be construed as criticism of the
great young men and women who serve in our Nation's defense in
uniform and in civilian clothes. But, I think that we're at a
different time, when many of the policies and rules that we
administer of this force, they were derived at a different
time, and the times have changed, and it's time to relook at
what those changes should be, because I believe that we're
rapidly approaching the point of an unsustainable mix of cost,
force balance, and lethality. And that will only get worse as
we continue to feed the personnel costs that have been
described by my colleagues here.
I think it's safe to assume that significant top-line
relief is not going to bail this out. And so, we have to look
at what are the ways what we can adjust that. And because many
of these policies have been implemented over time and they have
interwoven with one another, layered on top of one another, it
has to be looked at in its totality. Pull one lever, and you
might get second- and third-order effects that are unintended.
I think the real issues that I see is that, as we try to
adjust the size of those who serve in the broad Department of
Defense, the solution is always to go to the Active Force and
reduce that. We, as has been mentioned, have a compensation
system for the All-Volunteer Force that is really not tuned to
that force. And I thank the committee for the work that they've
done, particularly this year, to crack the door and begin the
reform process there.
We have a uniform promotion paradigm that tends to bleed
expertise away from the force to fill a hierarchical promotion
model that has been in place for decades. We are bound to a
well-intentioned Goldwater-Nichols legislation that achieved
the joint imperative, but has caused a bloating of our joint
headquarters staffs in Washington and around the world. We have
a government employee and civilian contractor ratio that is
significantly out of balance with the fighting force that we
field today. And our civilian personnel system values longevity
over merit. And we have become extraordinarily disposed to
filling our service headquarters with contractors without a
means of really determining the number of contractors that we
have working at any given time in these headquarters
facilities, and whether or not that's the optimum solution.
So, I think, as I look at it, some of the things, as we
debate the size of the force, I believe the going-in position
should be to hold constant the number of Active- Duty
personnel, and work the other variables first of civilian
employees, Guard, Reserve, and contractors.
We should reform DOPMA and tune it in a way that we can
adjust the time-and-service requirements and the time-and-
grade-promotion requirements for the force, but I think it has
to be tuned in such a way that give the services, and even
specialties within each service, the latitude to be able to
make the decisions to best incentivize the people that we want
to keep. And clearly, we have to change the ``up or out''
policy, particularly in some of the technical areas that are
going to only increase in competitiveness in future years. And
the one that has been mentioned and most frequently comes to
mind is cyber. But, if we do that, I think we'll have to put in
place some longevity pay raises so that we can keep that
talent, and they'll still be able to take care of their
personal obligations that they have.
With respect to Goldwater-Nichols, I really do believe that
we have to maintain a legislative hammer on the Department of
Defense with that joint forcing function, because if we don't,
the services will likely retreat back into more tribal
behavior. But, clearly, we have to adjust Goldwater-Nichols so
that we cannot use it as a personnel management system, but
really what it was intended for, and that's to improve the
jointness of the force.
And I do think, when we get to the general and flag officer
ranks, we should maintain the current requirements, but I do
believe that we can lift some of the mandated requirements on
some of the more junior ranks within the services.
I also believe, and jumping more to the organizational
construct, that as we look at the role of joint commanders and
command--and I know it's been discussed before the committee,
the idea of the Chairman being moved from an advisory to a more
command position--I really do believe that civilian control of
the military is fundamental to who we are, and I maintain that
the best approach to that is to maintain the advisory role of
the Chairman. Nor do I believe that we should move to a general
staff, because it is important that we have current
operational, technical, and geopolitical experience moving in
and out of the headquarters so that we can make better
decisions.
With regard to DOD civilian personnel management, returning
to a scheme similar to the NSPS, or National Security Personnel
System, I think is very important. I had the opportunity, when
it was in effect, when NSPS was in effect, to implement it in
several commands, and, within months, you could see the change:
young people enthused, eager; where merit mattered, and not
longevity; where they didn't have the concern about, ``If I'm
the last one to be hired, I'm going to be the first one to
leave, should there be any force cutbacks.'' I think that we
really need to look at putting that back in place.
And we have to get our arms around the contractor numbers
within our headquarters. Right now, we can't do that. If we do
get a number, it's normally time late. And it's a very
amorphous thing to work with. Similar to what we have with
headquarters authorizations for uniformed personnel, for old-
time equivalent for government civilians, I think we should set
numbers of contractors for the headquarters, and not let that
float, because if we go after headquarters numbers, and we drop
uniformed government civilians, the headquarters, in my view,
will not change in size; we'll just add more contractors into
the mix. And the problem with that is, when a headquarters gets
big, it makes more work for other people and for themselves,
and it justifies its existence that way.
So, those are some thoughts, and I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Admiral Roughead follows:]
The Prepared Statement by Admiral Gary Roughead, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, members of the Committee
thank you for the opportunity to offer my thoughts on Department of
Defense (DOD) personnel reform and strengthening the All Volunteer
Force. I applaud and welcome the more strategic view this Committee has
taken in assessing global security challenges and the efficacy of our
Armed Forces today and in the future. Nothing is more important to our
nation's security strategy than getting the force design right and
optimizing the total personnel strategy to that design.
In addition to command at sea I have had the privilege of being a
Service Chief and a member of the Joint Chiefs, serving on Combatant
Command (COCOM) and Service staffs, and commanding a NATO Striking
Force in the Atlantic and a Joint Task Force in the Pacific. But I
spent my life in the U.S. Navy because of the extraordinary young men
and women who serve in it. It was my pleasure, every day, to sail and
serve with them and there was no higher honor than to have been
afforded the opportunity to lead them. Any comments and recommendations
I make are not criticisms of their dedication, commitment and
contribution to the hard and important work they do around the world.
The fundamental question I inferred from your letter of invitation
was: is the total DOD force optimally organized, sized and compensated
for the security demands of today and those we will likely face in the
future? The answer is--no. The organization and processes under which
we operate, fight and manage the force were derived in different times.
The world has changed. We have not and do not lack for recommended
solutions. Numerous studies over the years have examined organization
and processes. Many recommendations have been implemented, many have
not. The solutions are organizationally and mechanically simple, but
the personal impact on those who serve and have served is largely
distasteful and the political will, in the information environment in
which we live, more doubtful. The work you are doing at this time is
critical because we are at a point where the current force is
approaching an unsustainable mix of cost, force balance and lethality.
We continue to sacrifice procurement and the necessary maintenance and
training funds of a shrinking fighting force to feed the current
personnel structure. One credible estimate projects that with personnel
and operation and maintenance costs growing, as they have been at four
and two percent respectively, those two accounts will consume 86
percent of the allowed DOD budget by 2021 and all of it by 2024, the
last year of the second term of the next president. As much as we all
desire, significant topline relief is not likely. Piecemeal solutions
will not work. A total examination and comprehensive revision of the
manpower organization and governing personnel legislation and policies
of the DOD is required.
We continue to attempt to reduce manpower costs by cutting the
number of those who are on point--active duty uniformed personnel. We
have an all volunteer force with a compensation and benefit system that
is not tuned to that force and a uniformed promotion paradigm that
bleeds needed technical expertise to fulfill a one size fits all
hierarchical promotion model. We are bound to well-intentioned and
needed joint forcing legislation (Goldwater-Nichols) that has achieved
the joint imperative but has ballooned headquarters' overhead. We have
a uniformed, government service civilian and service contractor ratio
conspicuously out of balance to our fighting force. We attempt to
attract and retain quality new generations of government civilian
employees with a civilian personnel system that values longevity over
merit. We have become exceedingly disposed to headquarters service
contractor support without knowing how many service contractors we are
paying for and whether they are the optimum solution.
Sizing the Force. The number of active duty uniformed personnel
has fluctuated since 9/11. Ground force numbers appropriately increased
during the high demand years in Iraq in Afghanistan. Active duty Navy
and Air Force personnel declined, but in the aggregate the total number
of active duty personnel has not increased that much. The civilian
workforce, after early post 9/11 growth, has remained illogically
stable with some growth occurring within the acquisition community at a
time when we are buying less. Reserve and Guard numbers are rarely in
question; and, while public debates rage over reductions in active
uniformed personnel, there is relative silence regarding the other
components of the force. Further force reductions should begin with
holding active uniformed numbers constant and reducing the other
components, primarily civilian numbers.
Compensation and Officer Promotion. The changes to compensation
begun by this Committee are positive and relevant to new generations
who will serve in our military. Regarding officer promotion and
retention, it is time to reform the Defense Officer Personnel
Management Act (DOPMA). Time in service and time in grade promotion
milestones should be tuned to the needs of each Service and to
specialties within each Service. This will be key to incentivizing
service and can make a difference in retaining quality and skill.
Similarly, the `up or out of DOPMA' should be eliminated in skill areas
determined by the Services. This will be particularly important in
areas such as cyber where broad competition for talent will be intense.
Retaining experience and skill in a niche area will be more important
than promotion opportunity. This change will require a longevity and
skill pay scale for those who do not promote but are committed for the
long haul to their area of technical expertise.
Goldwater-Nichols Legislative Reform. Without the forcing function
of the Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986 we would not be
the unmatched fighting force we are today. The joint imperative must be
sustained; however, adherence to Goldwater-Nichols today is more
synonymous with promotion requirements than war-fighting skill and
experience. Those promotion requirements have caused the size of joint
staffs (COCOM and JCS Staff) to increase in size based on assignment
throughput rather than necessary and appropriate work. Concomitantly,
it has reduced the attractiveness of Service staff assignments where
expertise, experience in and the responsibility for manning, training
and equipping of our forces reside. Joint promotion requirements for
Flag and General officers should be retained, and Services should
manage joint assignment strategies and incentive strategies to support
senior leader requirements. Mandated numbers and promotion ratios
between Service and the Joint Staff should be relaxed to best spread
skill, talent and relevant experience among Joint and Service staffs.
This more limited approach is consistent with addressing and tailoring
to that which Service and joint organizations need rather than
incentivizing all.
Recent testimony before this committee addressed the
responsibilities of Combatant Commanders, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the nature of their staffs. In the case of the
former, the trend to Joint Task Forces leading the fight has called
into question the role of the Combatant Commander. That is a behavioral
not an organizational problem because senior headquarters and leaders
tend to bypass the chain of command. Combatant Commanders must command
and be accountable for operations across the spectrum of operations,
including combat. Their authority and accountability must be seen in
their respective region or function as absolute and continuous. Joint
Task Forces will remain the optimum organization for focused operations
but the COCOM must be accountable for effects and outcomes. The tasks
and functions of COCOM staffs should not replicate those of subordinate
Joint Task Force or functional staffs and COCOM staffs must be sized
for oversight not redundancy.
Nothing speaks more to our nation's principle of civilian control
of the military than the advisory role of our most senior uniformed
leaders, particularly the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff--that should
not change. With regard to recent musings and proposals regarding
creating a `General Staff,' this could potentially create an elite
military entity that could generate outsize influence while limiting
the infusion of recent operational, war-fighting, and technical
experience into joint staffs in our rapidly evolving world.
DOD Civilian Personnel Management. Our nation is fortunate indeed
to have dedicated men and women who are drawn to and take great pride
in public service. As previously mentioned, the number of civilian
personnel in the DOD must be rationalized with the number serving in
uniform. Additionally, the management of that force should value merit
over longevity. It was my duty and pleasure to have implemented the
National Security Personnel System in several commands when it was in
effect in a previous administration. The effects were quickly
apparent--increased interest in government service, greater optimism
regarding being rewarded more rapidly for hard work and innovation, and
less concern for being the first to be let go if the last to come
aboard--quality and hard work mattered.
Staff Size and Service Contractor Accounting. The number of people
in an organization should be a function of work to be performed. We
account for and control uniformed personnel and government civilian
personnel through end strength and Full Time Equivalent (FTE)
authorization. There is no method to account for service contractors on
staffs; accordingly, staff size can float based on money available
rather than work to be performed. Any count of contractors on a staff
is vague and time late, and staffs can grow with limited control and
awareness. Without more disciplined control in this area right-sizing
organizations and staffs will be a mirage. While not perfect, creating
a contractor personnel authorization at the service and joint staff
level, i.e. CPN [contractor personnel Navy] (in the case of Navy) or
CPA [contractor personnel Army] (Army), etc. is a way to stabilize,
monitor and control the size of headquarters. Once stabilized and
controlled the work of debating and defining the appropriate roles and
mix of government civilian versus contractor can take place. Absent
that we will continue to attempt to design an optimal total force using
nebulous variables.
Personnel management, especially reforming compensation and right-
sizing overhead, is hard, complex and politically challenging. My
comments and recommendations touch on what I consider to be the major
areas of needed reform. I am hopeful they are helpful, and I look
forward to your questions.
Chairman McCain. Well, thank you, Admiral.
And, Admiral, I was just--not long ago, read a wonderful
book called ``The Admirals'' about five-star admirals in the
Navy in World War II. And I noticed with some interest that
Admiral Nimitz, at one point in command, ran a ship aground. Do
you think that's possible today?
Admiral Roughead. Senator, I think we have some recent
cases where we've done that, but I will tell you that the
fitness report that was written on Admiral Nimitz after he ran
a ship aground was on the door of my office as I walked out
every night. And to me, I think it's important that we still
give people the latitude to make mistakes and move on.
Chairman McCain. Do you think that's the case?
Admiral Roughead. I know that we have, in recent years,
allowed some people who have made some significant mistakes or
errors in judgment to move on.
Chairman McCain. Dr. Rostker, you bring up a really
fascinating--there's many aspects of this issue. I mean, it's
really a--this is a aspect where there are many different
facets of it, but you're advocating a--changing the current 30-
year retirement in--to 40 years, which, I think, given
longevity and capabilities and experience and knowledge, is
something that ought to be considered. But, what about the fact
that there are specialties that put a premium on physical
strength and fitness? How does this work? And I'd be interested
in the other witnesses' view of this. This would be a huge
change.
Dr. Rostker. And I--I agree with you, and I think that we
have to address the needs for each. In my state--in my oral
statement, I made the point about not taking on the issue of
youth and vigor in the combat arms, but I would also point out
that all of the storied admirals of World War II would not have
been around, they would all have been retired under our current
personnel system.
The issue becomes how we manage the specialty force. And
we've heard here about Goldwater-Nichols. Goldwater- Nichols
has, basically, added 5 years of career content to an already
jammed career. And it has deprived the services of the talents
of many officers who are being jointed at the time in previous
years they would have learned how to manage the corporate
entity. We send people to school. The Secretary is out, talking
about new initiatives for time with industry. And yet, we're
going to send people home when they're 52 years old in the
acquisition corps and planning and things that don't require
youth and vigor? Can you imagine being a corporation and saying
to the majority of your acquisition executives, ``You've
reached 52. Go home''? That's when they've learned their craft.
We do that with FAOs [foreign area officers], we do that with
the intelligence community. The hardest fill jobs in cyber are
not the hackers, but the people who are managing hackers. But,
we'll send them home when they reach 52--52, of course, being
30 years from the time of commission.
So, I think we have to break the one-size-fits-all
paradigm, and address your concern for youth and vigor, and
address my concern for the specialty corps as we build career
structures that make sense for the individual skills that are
needed for the future.
Chairman McCain. Sometimes that could be as short--early
age as 48----
Dr. Rostker. It could be.
Chairman McCain.--in some cases.
Dr. Chu.
Dr. Chu. I couldn't agree more with the notion that we
ought to look at variable career lengths. And I think the
retirement reform you enacted this last--in this current
authorization act opens the door for the Department to begin
moving that direction.
DOPMA's current 30-year ceiling is an issue. There is some
latitude in the statute to extend in order to recall people
from retired status. But, that's not really a panacea as an
option. Congress, in the last decade, moved to loosen some of
the age restrictions, which is another problem. Some people
join the military late, and so they might be the 60-year-old
acquisition executive, and we'd still like to keep them. And I
think those--that greater latitude is very helpful.
But, I think, fundamentally, it--it's not about a
particular constraint, it's about--the paradigm the Department
follows, that everybody should look--as you said--more or less
the same. And I think that Admiral Roughead touched on this in
his remarks, that we're grooming all officers to be Chief of
Staff. That's not true. Most officers are not going to be Chief
of Staff, as is obvious from an arithmetic perspective. Many
are wanting a fulfilling career, where they move to a middle
management or a middle level of expertise, and they continue to
serve in that level for a longer period of time.
And so, my play would be to encourage variability. First,
the Department needs to be focused on what experience mix it
wants, by skill area, both officer and enlisted, as a guide to
what that variability should look like. So, in some areas,
where youth and vigor is essential, you might actually want
somewhat shorter careers. You already have a problem with some
people hanging on, so to speak, as we all know, as they get to
15, 16, 17 years? service. Congress honors that with a
sanctuary. Eighteen years of service, you get there, you have
to really commit a crime not to get to 20 years. That's a
mistake. The new retirement system allows you to say, ``It's
time to leave.'' And you can take a significant prize home with
you. But, some other people ought to stay for much longer
periods of time, as Dr. Rostker argued. It--senior command,
senior experience in various specialized fields--medicine is an
example of that career track, as well. And we ought to retain
people for longer periods of time. So, I think it's the issue
of variability in career length that ought to receive
attention, not necessarily just extending everyone.
Chairman McCain. Mr. Hale, your view.
Dr. Hale. I think it's a good idea to look carefully at
this. I mean, it would be a far-reaching change, and it could
have significant effects on costs and other things. But, the
longevity trends, and, as Dr. Rostker pointed out, the idea of
sending home experienced acquisition or financial professionals
or others, at that matter, at ages 52 doesn't make much sense.
And so, I think it is definitely worth looking at.
Chairman McCain. Senator Reed.
Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And, gentlemen, thank you for your testimony.
It strikes me--and it is a point Dr. Rostker made, but I
think everyone echoed it--is that anything we do will have an
effect about 20 years from now, when you work through the
system, which begs the question, What will the military look
like 20 years from now?--which leads another question, Who's
going to tell us what it should look like? And how do we get
that information from the Department of Defense.
Then, to go Dr. Chu's point, this is right now very much
fragmented and culturally distinct. You know, the Army employed
copious numbers of warrant officers to fly helicopters in
Vietnam because they needed them. Today, we have drone
operations, but they have to be Air Force culture, qualified
pilots and in the career path to move up in command squadrons
of F-16s, et cetera. So, I think this just--I want--we'll start
with Dr. Chu and go down--comments about, How do we, the
Congress, get the Department to focus on the force 20 years
from now in a coherent way across all the different services
and components of the services?
And, Dr. Chu?
Dr. Chu. My suggestion would be to ask the Department, in
its annual presentation of the President's budget request, to
speak to why they chose the personnel mix and their cultural
norms that are embodied in that document. So, I would start the
conversation with, Where are you today? And why did you make
those choices? And do you think those--and, to the Department,
the challenge would be, Why do you think those choices are good
for the--what the force is going to mature to look like in 5
years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, et cetera? I would
acknowledge, no one can foresee exactly what the force
characteristics are going to be 20 years from now. And, in
fact, I think where that conversation leads is encouragement,
particularly under current circumstances. So, it's not like the
Cold War, where you had known opponent and a view of how a
conflict might unfold. We don't know. And therefore, I think
the real issue in looking forward is, Have--Has the Department
offered for the Congress' consideration, a reasonably rich set
of hedging choices so that if we're wrong, as we're likely to
be, as Secretary Gates has testified repeatedly, we have some
backup plan, some foundation, particularly from a personnel
perspective, which we can build?
But, I'd start by challenging the Department to explain,
How did you get this Active Duty figure? How did you decide the
Reserve-component number? Is it something other than just
history of what you did last year? What about Federal
civilians? All right? That will set up a scramble in the
Department, because civilian manning is largely a decentralized
decision. There'll be some preparation time needed for people
to give you a reasonable answer. And what about the contractor
force, which I think, as my colleagues this morning have
testified, is largely a safety valve for the Department. So,
you constrain Active Duty, you constrain Reserve numbers, you
constrain Federal civilians. What pops out, as long as people
have money, is they hire contractors instead.
Senator Reed. Dr. Rostker, please.
Dr. Rostker. Well, I'd like to invoke the great American
philosopher Yogi Berra. Yogi said, ``The future ain't want it
used to be.'' And I think that's right.
First, we need to put the ``p'' of planning back into PPP
[Program Protection Plan]. We're not doing that. We're just
programming.
We have a good idea of what our capabilities will be, to a
fair amount of the force, the majority of the force, because
it's tied up in our capital stock. So, the first thing we need
to be able to do is man our squadrons and our aircraft carriers
and our bomber force that we're building. We know the mechanic
needs, the pilot needs. Those projections are fairly
straightforward. And when I talk about the experience profile,
I'm talking about that.
The unknown is the flexibility for dealing with ISIS
[Islamic State of Iraq and Syria], the growth in Special Ops
[Operations], and their flexibility is the most important
thing. I once did a paper for the Guggenheim Institute about
thinking about the last--the next war. And I--and everybody
else who did papers had very specific notions about the next
war. And I used the Yogi Berra quote.
The thing that distinguishes the Defense Department is that
we bet on a lot of horses. We didn't close down the cavalry
until we knew that tanks were--we have a long history in the
Navy of battleships and aircraft carriers fighting it out until
we knew what was going on. And that redundancy in our services
and within our service has proven to give us the flexibility to
be able to adjust to the future. And flexibility is the key.
Senator Reed. I have very little, if no, time, Dr.--Mr.
Hale and Admiral Roughead. Any comments?
Dr. Hale. No, I don't have anything.
Chairman McCain. Admiral?
Admiral Roughead. I would take a little different tack. I
think that the ability for the Department to reform itself--I
question that. The most significant change that's taken place
in the U.S. military in the last 50-60 years was the creation
of the All-Volunteer Force. It's not the technology or
anything. It's All-Volunteer Force. That was produced by the
Gates Commission. Thomas Gates was an opponent of the All-
Volunteer Force. He was the chairman of it. But, yet, it
created the military we have today, which I submit is one heck
of a military. And so, I think what we really need to do is to
bring the same flavor of people together to really look at this
in its totality. And there's going to have to be some china
broken, and that normally does not happen within a bureaucracy.
Senator Reed. Thank you very much, Admiral.
Thank you, gentlemen.
Chairman McCain. Senator Fischer.
Senator Fischer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As we're looking ahead 10, 15, 20 years, and trying to do
this planning, and comparing it to where we were when
Goldwater-Nichols reforms were put into place, how can we--
carry on with this conversation--how can we achieve the
flexibility without throwing out a lot of the reforms that were
made under Goldwater-Nichols? If we look at joint duty, for
example, and if that is needed in the future, if it's
appropriate in the future, or does it just add on to more
headquarters staff? How--do we form the commission, Admiral, to
get into the weeds on every reform that's in there, and then
figure out a way to be flexible?
You had mentioned we need to change that ``up and out''
policy. And, Dr. Rostker, you had mentioned that the force must
not be allowed to stagnate in place. But, yet, I think we're
going to need people to remain in place longer to achieve the
skills that they need to give them the flexibility for the
challenges that we face in the future. You know, you can look
at cyber. A few of you mentioned that. That's going to take
experts, it's going to take people who can respond quickly to
change as that environment changes.
So, I would just ask your opinions on that, if we could
start with you, Admiral.
Admiral Roughead. Yes, ma'am. And I would say that, one, I
don't think a commission similar to the Gates Commission gets
into the aegis. I think that they can generate the design of
the total force that will be required going into the future.
I--but, I also believe that--particularly in Goldwater-Nichols,
that we've constrained ourselves with some of the requirements
that are there. By forcing the joint requirement down onto the
major, lieutenant, commander level, what we have done is, we
have basically said--sent the signal that staff duty is more
important than honing your warfighting craft.
We have also, by putting in the requirement that the
service staffs can't promote at a rate higher than the joint
staff, we've disincentivized people from serving on service
staffs, where we man, train, and equip, and where most of the
money of the Department is spent. And so, we've lost that
talent pool and experience and expertise.
So, I think that, in Goldwater-Nichols, we can float that
requirement higher. But, it also, as I said, has to be done in
conjunction with some of the other policies. The fact that we
have may have a good cyberwarrior who is not a qualified joint
officer, and allow that person to stay in the Navy longer, or
in the military longer, that's okay. So, I think we have to
look at how all of these things work together. But, I think
that we've forced the joint requirement down too low, and we
have disincentivized some of other priorities that I think are
going to be important for a fighting force of the future.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Mr. Hale?
Dr. Hale. So, I'd like to ask that you broaden your
thoughts on Goldwater-Nichols and think about whether we need
something analogous to that for our civilian workforce. We are
at the other extreme with regard to the civilians. That is,
there's not a lot of, often, moving around, especially at the
senior levels. And I wonder if, as we think about Goldwater-
Nichols, and fixing it for the military, we want to think about
how we engender some more rotational experience among those who
will ultimately be our civilian leaders. Maybe, as I say, we
need some version of Goldwater-Nichols for civilians.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Dr.----
Dr. Rostker. The first would be to extend the career, so we
can accommodate requirements like Goldwater-Nichols within the
career structure. But, the notion of stagnation in place is not
to imply that everyone needs to--that people need to advance.
And in certain technical areas, that might be fine to stay in
relatively the same job, but it tends to be in a particular
technical area. We are often told of the young officer who
says, ``I'm a great captain, and leave me to be a captain.''
Well, he may be a great captain when he's 30. I'm not sure
he'll be a great captain when he's 40. Again, youth and vigor
comes. So, he needs to either advance in his profession or
leave. It's very hard to say to somebody who's doing well,
``You have to go home, because we're worried about the next
generation.'' We can't do that in the civilian world. We don't
do that in the private sector. We must do that in the military.
Senator Fischer. Dr. Chu.
Dr. Chu. I'd urge we think about how we get the same
outcomes that we like of our Goldwater-Nichols, but at a lower
price, in terms of career content. The current--because I--as
your question, I think, implied, there are some good points to
what has been produced from Goldwater- Nichols. More joint
orientation by the senior officer corps, specifically. But, our
mechanism, as we all know, is an input-oriented one, ``You will
take this course, you will have this assignment for a certain
length of time, and such is the way to get there,'' which, of
course, adds to the career content issue Dr. Rostker has
raised.
And so, just as a personal example, in my judgment, one of
the most joint-oriented Army officers I encountered in my
career in the Department was Jack Keane. General Keane would
not qualify, under the rules. Until he was Deputy Commander of
Joint Forces Command, he had never had a joint assignment. Of
course, the issue is, you can't look inside the person's mind
easily. But, I do think, if I may be presumptuous, that the
confirmation power of the Senate is one tool to use. In other
words, part of the examination really ought to be, what is the
outlook of this officer on joint matters, and how has he or she
achieved that outlook? As opposed to prescribing so much how
the person gets there. I recognize there's the risk of
confirmation conversion, as people have unkindly labeled some
people's stance over the years, but I do think that might be
one small step to try to move away from the prescriptive
approach we use now, that you will take certain courses, you
will have certain experiences in order to achieve this
orientation, and to ask, in some fashion, that both the
Department and the Congress look at people more holistically.
Senator Fischer. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Manchin.
Senator Manchin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank all of you. I appreciate very being here.
It's--someone coming from the civilian ranks and not being
blessed enough to be in the military service, but now sitting
back and watching this and trying to make sense of it, how we
run the operations, is unbelievable. And it doesn't make any
sense that we talk about--now we've got sequestration, we've
had budget caps, all the different things. And you would think
that the system, the Department of Defense being our largest
Department in Federal Government, would be able to make
adjustments and changes. But, it doesn't seem to come unless
there's congressional mandates for that to happen.
I can't get a handle on the contractors. I've tried. I've
been here for 5 years, and I'm trying to get a handle on the
strength of contract. The contracting forces, which we should
look at, because I know the reduction of force. And every time
we run into budget problems, it's always a reduction of the
people that we depend to defend the country. And I know the
size of the staff doesn't seem to change proportionally, when
we should be changing. Staff seems to be constant, if not
growing. But, contractors is just an absolutely misnomer, here.
We've had as high--I mean, our report--I know this is not
accurate, but in 2014 it was showing 641,000 full-time-
equivalent contractors at a cost of $131 billion. I can never
get--I can't get that answer. I don't know why it's so hard for
the Department of Defense to be able to tell us how many
contractors we're paying and kind of filling slots and
substituting and playing a kind of a movement game, here.
And maybe--Admiral Roughead, I know you've been on the
front line of this thing, but give me some insight on this.
Admiral Roughead. Well, thank you, Senator. And my
observations are exactly the same as yours, because there's no
structure that defines the particular work, position, person
that applies to a contractor. We have that with our uniformed
and our government civilians. And I think that, as we look at
our headquarters structures, that there should be an
apportionment by billet, if you will, to use military speak,
for those contractor positions that get done. Otherwise, what
you find is that the money buys as many contractors as it can
afford. And so, I think we need to do that.
I would also say that all contractors are not created
equal. I mean, we have some----
Senator Manchin. Sure.
Admiral Roughead.--contractors that are maintaining
airplanes, and we've made the decision that that approach is
best.
Senator Manchin. Why can't that scenario be accomplished?
Does it have to be a direction from Congress, legislated? Or
can Department of Defense do that? The accountability of
contractors.
Admiral Roughead. I would leave whether Department of
Defense can do that to some of my colleagues who have been in
the Department, but----
Senator Manchin. Okay.
Admiral Roughead.--but, I really do think that that would
be one way to get our arms around that.
Senator Manchin. Dr. Rostker, if you could comment on that.
And, Mr. Hale, I'll come right back to you.
Dr. Rostker. The reason we have the contractors is because
we don't account for them. We buy service. It's in the O&M
[Operations and Maintenance] budget. It's just dollars. And it
purely comes back to the Comptroller's shop, in terms of
controlling those contracts that are used to purchase the
services of people.
The Congress, it--has said we want to have a limit on the
size of headquarters. We want to have a limit on the number of
civilians.
Senator Manchin. Yeah.
Dr. Rostker. And then, the headquarters go out and hire
contractors, and they sit behind the same desk that a civilian
sat behind. I would suggest they have loyalties that are not
necessarily in line with those of the government, like
maintaining the contract. And so, we can go to the American
people--you can go to the American people and say, ``We're
controlling government. We've limited the number of
civilians.''
Senator Manchin. Yeah.
Dr. Rostker. But----
Senator Manchin. Mr. Hale.
Dr. Rostker.--we haven't.
Dr. Hale. So, it's harder than it--than you'll think to
count contractors. If you do a firm fixed-price contract--many
of them are now--there is no responsibility on the part of the
contractor to tell you how many people are doing it. They just
have a job, they get the job done.
In response to congressional requirements, DOD is inserting
clauses in many of its contracts, directing the contractor to
estimate the number of full-time-equivalent people. But, it
takes time, and that's why you're not seeing this data.
The way to control it, in my view, is, you control military
and Federal civilians by billets or by FTEs [Full-time
Equivalents]. You control the contractors by limits on the
operation-and- maintenance funding. And that allows the
Department the flexibility to use firm fixed-price contracts,
when they make sense and we want to have that.
Senator Manchin. The hardest thing that I had--and I'll
finish up with this--the hardest that I had is that, basically,
we had contractors of--fighting, basically, on the front lines.
I know that people said that didn't happen, but we--I know that
happens. And I know that they're hired, and they go in to
force. They seem like--at 10 years, they come out of the
military, they retire from the military and take a pay three to
four times higher. That didn't make any sense to me. You can't
justify that. You can't sell it back home. And we keep talking
about reduction of forces, and we're coming back, paying three
to four times more for the same person that we reduced--or
reducted, and put them back into the private sector and on a
contract. How do we stop--is there any way to stop that from
happening?
Dr. Chu?
Dr. Chu. I think, ultimately, as my colleagues have
implied, the contracts are a safety valve. And the real issue
is what you're asking the Department to do. So, let's take the
headquarters issue. Without in any way being cheeky here, the
office I formerly held, a major activity was answering
congressional correspondence. Many of these letters were--
required a significant research project. Someone had to do that
work. If you place a limit on how many Federal civilians can be
employed, the solution, as Dr. Rostker says, is the office uses
the funds at its disposal to hire contractors to help with that
task.
So, I think the ultimate break on excessive contractor
employment, to the extent it is, indeed, excessive, is the
issue of what the Department's being asked to--what function
it's being asked to perform and perhaps the too- tight limits
on the resource inputs it might more usefully employ for that
purpose--Active Duty personnel, I think, in the case in point
that you were citing. You're--you are going to get situations
where people who leave the military will have a skill set
that's very valuable in the private sector, perhaps serving the
Department of Defense. But, to me, that's--that's just a signal
that there's an excess demand for that skill and that we've
suppressed meeting that demand with Federal civilians and
Active Duty or Reserve-com personnel, and it pops out in a
contract. The contractor, eager to--service, as Mr. Hale said,
offers a very significant salary to the--so, it's the safety-
valve issue and the question of the burdens of the Department
and its business practice, I think, that is ultimately the
break on the situation that you are--that--with which you are
concerned.
Senator Manchin. Thank you very much.
I'm sorry.
Dr. Hale. Can I just add, very briefly, one of the wartime
problems that you raised occurs because we place limits on the
number of troops that can be in--and that causes the Department
to turn to contractors.
Senator Manchin. That doesn't make any sense all, but I
appreciate your answers.
Chairman McCain. Senator Ernst.
Senator Ernst. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you, gentlemen, for being here today.
Mr.--or, Dr. Rostker, if we could start with you, I know
that you are well aware of the heavy deployment schedule that
we have had over the past 14 years or so. Many members have
mobilized, they have deployed, time after time after time, and
we still continue to do that with a number of our SOCOM
[Special Operations Command] units, as well. What can we do for
those that are in more of the--well, I've met a lot of Active
Duty soldiers. Many of them have deployed over and over again.
But, then we also have that group that seems to be in the type
of unit that is maybe a training environment. They have spent a
career in those types of positions where they haven't deployed.
How can we make sure that we are offering the same
opportunities for everyone across the board? Because, of
course, when you look at promotions and advancements, we want
to make sure that everybody has opportunity for that, even
broadening and strategic-type assignments. What can we do about
that to even the playing field?
Dr. Rostker. Well, there is a--deployments are by units,
obviously, but also by skill sets. And so, there are certain
skill sets that will not deploy. Generally, it has been to the
advantage of servicemembers to deploy, because those
considerations come into promotion boards and through the so-
called ``up or out'' system. There are rewards. But, it will
not necessarily fall evenly, depending upon the particular
occupations that people have.
I think the broad question is also, what do we do for the
servicemembers and their families for those who are deploying
quite often? And this is really a unique and new problem for
the Department of Defense.
Senator Ernst. Yes.
Dr. Rostker. We've never fought a war with this kind of
rotation. And, as you say, the 14 years is the longest in our
history. And we really do need to come to grips with what our
services are, not only to the servicemember, but particularly
to the family.
Senator Ernst. We have such a heavy rotation of deployments
with certain types of MOSs [Military Occupational Specialties]
or occupational skills, and maybe not others, but we need to
make sure that there is plenty of opportunity for everyone to
take advantage of those types of positions.
Admiral, of course, as we look at opportunities, there are
a lot of different thoughts in this area, but I am a little bit
concerned that the Department is really trying to mold our
officers and even some of our senior NCOs [Non-Commissioned
Offices] to aspire to be an intern at Facebook or Google. And
those are great organizations, but with these types of
assignments, they're lucrative, but we would rather see them
being a platoon leader or a company commander or a first
sergeant. And what impact will the Department's efforts to
place a greater emphasis or priority on these nontraditional
broadening assignments--what impact will that have, then, to
our force readiness, to actually win that next war?
Admiral Roughead. Yes, ma'am. Thank you for the question.
Before I get to it, I'd like to just comment on the
deployment piece. As----
Senator Ernst. Thank you. Please.
Admiral Roughead. As you know, the Navy has been deploying
for centuries. And I think it's important that, as we look to
the future employment of the force, that the model that's used
take into account the types of deployments. And not everyone
will be going, because--as Dr. Rostker said, because of
specialties and other considerations. But, I think that the--
that, you know, it took the Navy awhile to define the
deployment and readiness models. And I think we have to look at
that in that particular service.
With regard to some of the fellowship opportunities that
have been announced recently, my sense is that those are in
very small numbers. And I do think that there may be some value
in certain areas where people can go off, see how things are
done differently than within the Department of Defense, and
then come back in. But, again, I--you know, is this something
that will stack on top of the joint requirement, the
operational requirement, the educational requirement? And so,
my sense would be, you know, would that be something that you
would consider as a joint credit and then someone who would
come back in?
Senator Ernst. And definitely something that we should keep
an eye on. So----
Admiral Roughead. In limited numbers.
Senator Ernst. In limited numbers, that's absolutely
correct. Thank you, Admiral.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman McCain. Senator McCaskill.
Senator McCaskill. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just to underline some of the concerns of my colleagues.
Senator Manchin, on contractors. I have obviously spent a lot
of time, as Mr. Hale knows, on this subject in the time I've
been here. And one of the most surreal experiences was when I
discovered, one day, that the person testifying in front of me
about contracting had hired a contractor to prepare them for
the hearing. And that's when I realized, okay, this has gotten
a little out of control.
It's not that contractors are bad. It's not that
contractors aren't needed. As you indicated, Admiral Roughead,
there are many places that we're using contractors that it's
saving us money. They're performing functions well at a lower
cost. But, the problem is, there's so little transparency that
oversight is nearly impossible unless you have the tenacity of
a bulldog that's very, very rabid. And--because you can't find
them. You can't--it's amorphous. You can't figure out whether
the contracting activity is justified or whether it's a safety
valve. I mean, I think Dr. Chu just admitted they hired
contractors to answer congressional letters. You know, I'm not
sure that--we need to know this. We need to understand when
contractors are being utilized. So, I think your idea for an
authorization level on contractors is a valid one, and I would
like to see any response that any of you have for the record on
that, going forward.
[The information referred to follows:]
Dr. Robert Hale. It is reasonable to consider a cap on contractors
in the authorization legislation. The cap should be in dollar terms
since some contracts, especially fixed-price contracts, do not specify
the number of contractors. Importantly, before establishing a cap, the
Committee should discuss with the Department of Defense what data can
be made available. A cap would only be meaningful if the Department can
supply data that are consistent and accurate, both for use in setting
the cap and in measuring compliance.
More broadly, the Committee should consider changes that would
reduce the use of contractors in cases where government employees
(especially civilian employees) should be used. Contractors are
sometimes employed because they can be put in place more quickly than
government civilians. OPM is working to speed up hiring, an effort that
the Committee should support and monitor. Contractors are also
sometimes used because, compared with a government civilian employee, a
contractor can be terminated much more quickly. As I indicated in my
testimony, DOD needs authority to terminate poorly performing
government civilians more quickly while still preserving protections
against misuse of the civil service.
Admiral Roughead. Just to underline some of the concerns of my
colleagues, Senator Manchin on contractors. I have obviously spent a
lot of time as Mr. Hill knows, on the subject from the time I have been
here. And one of the most surreal experiences was when I discovered one
day that the person testifying in front of me about contracting had
hired a contractor to prepare them for the hearing. And that is when I
realized okay, this has gotten a little out of control. It is not that
contractors are bad. It is not the contractors aren't needed as you
indicated Admiral Roughead, they're many places that were using
contractors that it's saving us money. They are performing functions
well at a lower cost. But the problem is, there is so little
transparency that oversight is nearly impossible unless you have the
tenacity of a bulldog that's very, very rabid. And because you cannot
find them. You can't--it's amorphous. You cannot figure out whether the
contracting activity is justified or whether it's a safety valve. I
mean, Dr. Chu just admitted they hired contractors to answer
congressional letters. I'm not sure that--we need to know this. We need
to understand when contractors are being utilized. So I think your idea
for an authorization level on contractors is a valid one and I would
like to see any response that any of you have for the record on that
going forward.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Senator McCaskill. I want to talk a little bit about what
we have come to refer in this committee in the last several
hearings as the deputy deputy dog syndrome. That is, in the
civilian force, the springing up like mushrooms at a certain
time of year of a new deputy to the deputy to the deputy. And
where is that coming from? Why is there this seem-to-be growth
of people with titles? Is it just the need for titles, in terms
of, you know, how you're viewed within the civilian force--the
civilian workforce at the Pentagon? Is there really a need for
all these many, many layers of personnel that seemingly have
some kind of authority over someone else? Has this thing gotten
too layered? I mean, it appears to me it's gotten too layered,
but I would love your take on that.
Dr. Rostker?
Dr. Rostker. We have a whole layer in the Defense
Department that never existed when I came to town. We had
Assistant Secretaries reporting to the Secretary of Defense.
Today, we have Assistant Secretaries reporting to Deputy
Secretaries to Under Secretaries who report to the Secretary of
Defense. So, the whole Department has grown at least one layer.
Senator McCaskill. And why?
Dr. Rostker. The desire to do coordination. So, in the area
of personnel, we have an Under Secretary and then we have a
series of Assistant Secretaries. At one point in time, those
Assistant Secretaries were all Deputy Assistant Secretaries,
and the Assistant Secretary have--we've just mushroomed the
whole--my judgment, the whole Department up one layer. And it
just grew out of hand.
Senator McCaskill. How can you--how can we crank that back?
Do you have any ideas, Mr. Hale? How could we, from--as
overseers, as--in an oversight capacity, trying to get a handle
on the way we're using resources, how do we stop that?
Dr. Hale. Well, let me just start by saying, for the
record, that the organization I ran, I think, was, by Pentagon
standards, relatively flat. There were no Assistant Secretaries
in that Comptroller's shop. But, I understand your concern. I
mean, you've tried to put limits on headquarters. That makes
sense to me. I think, in the end, you're going to have to let
the Department decide how to organize that more limited
numbers, that what I would appeal to you when you're trying to
do this, too, is to try to reduce the workload, the sunsetting
of reports, is an excellent idea. We----
Senator McCaskill. Right.
Dr. Rostker.--spent a lot of time preparing reports. But,
if we're going to reduce the size of the headquarters, at least
in my experience, people over there were working hard, for the
most part. There were a few slackers, but, for the most part.
We've got to reduce the demand on them. Some of that's
Congress, but some of it is internal, as well.
In the end, Senator McCaskill, I think you've got to let
the Department figure out how to organize itself within those
more limited numbers. Hopefully, the more limited numbers will
engender some reduction in the concerns that you're
expressing----
Senator McCaskill. Okay.
Dr. Rostker.--about hierarchy.
Senator McCaskill. Okay.
I'm out of time. I would, at some point, like to have some
input from this expertise that's presented here today on
acquisition force, the notion that the folks that rotate out of
there every year and a half are really--were being outgunned by
the people who are buying--who are selling stuff to us. Big
time, we're being outgunned, because there's not the buildup of
expertise in acquisitions that you're going to have to have at
the leadership level. And it's like the special corps you
talked about, Dr. Rostker. There are certain functions within
the military that we need not put one-size-fits-all. Because I
think acquisitions is a great example of where we've wasted a
lot of money because we didn't have the expertise there we
needed.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Isn't it also true that every time there
is a crisis or a problem, we create another bureaucracy and, in
some cases, an entire command that--as a solution? And I don't
think that's necessarily the long- term solution.
Senator Lee.
Senator Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thanks, to all of you, for the insightful testimony
that you've offered this morning.
As we've already discussed, there are a lot of benefits to
our country that come from having an All-Volunteer Force. We
also know that it's not a perfect system. And I'd like to take
a few minutes to address some of the criticisms and some of--
what some have characterized as the unintended consequences of
having an All-Volunteer Force, and perhaps ask some of our
witnesses about possible drawbacks to the All-Volunteer Force
and what can be done to address those.
Now, some have argued that the All-Volunteer Force creates
a circumstance in which the burdens--the risks and the real-
world consequences of war disproportionately affect members of
the military and their families, while the vast majority of the
public is largely shielded from the really awful effects of
war. General Stanley McChrystal has made this point with
respect to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, some critics take the argument even a step further
than this and say that if these burdens were extended more
evenly across the population, the United States would be far
more cautious in determining when, whether, and how to engage
in any type of armed conflict overseas.
So, Secretary Chu and Secretary Rostker, let's start with
you. Can you comment on these criticisms and on the long-term
conflicts, or consequences, rather, of an All- Volunteer Force?
And then, Admiral Roughead, can you comment on the potential
negative impacts of having our military actions being initiated
and executed by roughly 1 percent of the United States
population, a population that consists of decisionmakers in
Washington, D.C., and servicemembers, who tend to be stationed
at our Nation's military bases?
Dr. Chu. Senator, thank you. It's an important issue.
I do think that we should keep in mind that the 1 percent,
the small fraction of the country that serves, is really a
function of two key elements. First, what's the size of the
military, Active Duty especially, that we maintain? Much
smaller now, relative to our population base, than was true 20,
40, 60, 80 years ago. Second, what's the size of the population
cohort that would ordinarily be looked at for military service?
One reason the draft was needed, I would argue, in the
'50s, is, in fact, the United States, given it was an all--
essentially an all-male force, needed almost every able- bodied
young male to serve. It's just a function of the small birth
cohorts in the 1930s during the Great Depression. So, I would
observe that it's--for the size military maintained today,
given the size of our population, it's always going to be true
that only a small fraction see military service.
To the question you raise about ``Should the country be
more involved with that serve as an important element in the
national discussion of whether we should or should not commit
forces?''--I'd observe that we did involve the country, in the
last 15 years, in a significant way, because we mobilized the
Reserves. The Reserves really are a cross- section of the
United States, and touch every community in the country, every
State in the Union. And so, while it's not quite the same as
the old draft model that some put up, it does involve the
country in that. And I think it's a great tribute to the people
who volunteered for the service, that they answered that call.
The Reserves served with extraordinary performance levels in
this last long conflict, which continues to this day.
Senator Lee. And so, for that reason, in the future,
continuing to rely, or perhaps expanding our reliance, upon
Guard and Reserve units could have that effect, that--the
effect of distributing more broadly the people who were
involved.
Dr. Chu. In my judgment, yes, sir.
Senator Lee. Okay.
Dr. Rostker. I don't know whether you know, Senator, but
I'm a former Director of the Selective Service System, and have
dealt with the questions you've asked, literally for decades.
The fundamental question that led to the reform of
Selective Service in 1970 is, ``Who serves when not all
serve?'' And that deals with the issues that Dr. Chu talked
about, the size of the military and the cohorts that support
it. The notion that a sizable portion of the country will be
involved in the military, given the size of the military and
the technology of the military, is just not realistic.
The second is the nature of today's military. It's not a
matter of giving a soldier a rifle and 6 weeks of training, and
shipping him over--or her--now her--overseas, but a very
technical force that requires a great deal of schooling and
skill and knowledge. And we've talked about preserving and
managing that talent. Are we to turn that talent off and throw
that talent away just to create the opportunity to bring more
unskilled people into sharing in the experience of the
military? I think the use of the Reserves talks to the
involvement of the community. But, the fundamental issue is the
size of the population and the size of the military that we
have today.
Senator Lee. Admiral?
Admiral Roughead. Yes, sir. I echo some of what's been said
here. And I think that what we'll find as we go into the
future, particularly with the force levels that are deployed
now, especially on our ground forces, the--that number of Guard
and Reserve will come down significantly, so we're going to
lose that connectivity into society.
I think the other thing that's happening is that we're, in
a way, moving from an All-Volunteer Force to what I would call
an All-Professional Force, that the number of people serving in
the military today who have relatives who have been in the
military is going up. And so, are we going to end up with a
military that is more removed from society?
I--on the broader issue of voluntarism, I'm a proponent of
a national service, but how do you devise a plan that's
equitable and that some people get to go in the military and go
in harm's way, and other people go off and do things in the
homeland that are perhaps a little more benign? And I don't
know how you get to that. But, I do think that there's a need
for a commitment to national service.
Senator Lee. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Hirono.
Senator Hirono. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to paraphrase something you said, Admiral, the--
when you acknowledged that the All-Voluntary---Volunteer Army
was, I think, the single biggest change to the military. Can
you think of another change that could have this kind of a
profound impact on the military? Could it be the number of
women who are serving in the military, or some other example of
something coming down the pike that would result in a profound
change to the military?
Admiral Roughead. I think that the example that you cited,
women serving in the military, will transform the military, but
it will not be the change in the total model that we're using.
I really do think that there may be an opportunity, however, as
was mentioned here--How do you fuse and how do you design the
government civilian force and the military force that can
better share in responsibilities, particularly in the
headquarters areas? And I think a redesign in the aggregate may
approach the monumental change that occurred with the All-
Volunteer Force. And I think it's time to take a look at that.
Senator Hirono. Mr. Rostker, you noted that flexibility was
of--I think you used the words ``the most critical'' or a key
component to what we ought to be instilling in the military.
Can you give an example, perhaps, of where you see flexibility
not existing? And how would we ensure flexibility in a system,
a department that is massive and is still operating under old
paradigms in many, if not in most, cases?
Dr. Rostker. I think the most important issue in
flexibility is to manage the individual skill sets, the
careers, in ways that make sense for that career. And I would
do that by removing the statutory limit of 30 years of
commissioned service and let that be determined by the needs of
the individual service. We heard about the acquisition corps.
And we have the same issues in the intelligence area. We have
the same issues in the chaplains corps and the like. And that
would give us the flexibility to use people to the maximum
extent.
Senator Hirono. I think this panel has made a really strong
case for looking at DOPMA and the fact that it really doesn't
make sense to use a one-size-fits-all and everybody leaves at
age 52, where--but, actually, people make decisions to leave
much sooner than at age 52. Don't they make decisions earlier
and--when they see that, if they're going to have to leave at
52, they're going to decide at a much earlier age to leave.
Dr. Rostker. Absolutely. I can remember a young JAG [Judge
Advocate General] officer who was--came to me at 20 years of
service. He had a wonderful career. He was looking forward. Was
in the congressional legislation--legislative office and said
he was given the opportunity to lead one of the military
service organizations, but he really wanted to stay in the
Navy. And I said, ``You can't stay in the Navy. The--we cannot
offer you more than the possibility of 10 more years of
service, and then you will not be in your early 40s, you'll be
in your 50s.'' Chances of making admiral--there are two
admirals--were not--you couldn't take that to the bank. And so,
I had to counsel him to leave. He would not have left if he saw
the full career that he could have aspired to, even if he did
not make flag.
Senator Hirono. So, the changes to DOPMA should be made at
the congressional level? Is that----
Dr. Rostker. That provision would have to be made at the
congressional level. There is a provision today that the
Secretaries in military departments could institute special
boards and the like. But, I think we need to tell the managers
of the Department that each of the competitive categories, each
of these occupational groups, should have a career structure
that makes sense for that group. We allow them to compete
against each other in the competitive category, but within the
limits of the DOPMA career structure. We should open up that
career structure.
Senator Hirono. As I said, I think you all have made such a
strong case for making those kinds of appropriate changes to
DOPMA that I certainly hope that this committee will follow
through.
Thank you very much. I yield back.
Chairman McCain. Senator Rounds.
Senator Rounds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, thank you for your service, and thank you for
being here with us today.
Just a real quick down-the-line response, please, on this.
Do you see Goldwater-Nichols jointness requirements as an aid
or an obstacle to the system itself right now? And if it's an
obstacle, how would you make it better?
Dr. Chu?
Dr. Chu. I think it is both, unfortunately, so it has a
very good feature, which is to encourage a joint experience,
especially for those who aspire to more senior positions. It
has improved the quality of headquarters staffs. I saw that
when I served in the Department in the late 1980s and it was
first instituted. At the same time, as I suggested, it's a bit
too mechanistic and too much oriented through the inputs that
we think will provide a joint orientation, and not concerned
enough with whether the outcomes are the ones that we want.
And I think I would move to more flexibility about how you
can decide that someone has achieved the experience level that
you'd like to see that produces the kind of joint orientation
we'd like to have.
Senator Rounds. Dr. Rostker?
Dr. Rostker. I think Dr. Chu is probably right, but I saw
the negative sides of Goldwater-Nichols. I spent most of the
'90s on--in service secretariat as the Assistant Secretary of
the Navy for 6 years and then as Under Secretary of the Army.
And I saw officers coming into senior ranks who had never
served on the service staffs. And the model before that was to,
in fact, serve on the service staff so that great admirals,
like Carl Trost or Mike Boorda had served to learn their craft
of managing the enterprise. And managing the business of the
Navy is not going to be done in the joint arena, it's going to
be done in the Navy. And the--that next generation spent their
time being jointed. And then, when it came back to serve on the
service staffs, they largely did not have that experience.
I could adjust that, if you give me that 5 more years of
career content, so they could do both. But, the impact of
Goldwater-Nichols, because of its statutory requirements, was
to force out this very valuable time that was spent on the
service staffs. They still did their sea time, but they did not
do their service management time, which was so critical for the
future.
Senator Rounds. Mr. Hale?
Dr. Hale. So, I would not get rid of Goldwater-Nichols or
the joint requirement. I fear, as Admiral Roughead said, a
return to the tribal approach. But, more flexibility does sound
like it is appropriate.
I'll reiterate what I said earlier. I think the civilian
system worries me more, and we may need some analog to the
Goldwater-Nichols approach to demand some more rotational
experience for those who will be our civilian leaders. Perhaps
we can learn from the experience of the military and avoid the
adverse consequences. But, it did change behavior, and I think
some kind of effort on the civilian side would change behavior,
also, and it needs to happen.
Senator Rounds. Admiral?
Admiral Roughead. Yes, sir. As I've mentioned, I really do
believe that we have to keep the joint imperative on the force.
It needs to be reinforced at a more senior level. And by
lifting some of the mandated requirements in the junior ranks,
I think that we can rebalance the competencies in the service
staffs.
You know, we talk a lot about acquisition reform, but a lot
of how we enter into the acquisition process deals with setting
requirements and budget decisions and things like that. And by
forcing in more people earlier into the joint structure, we're
not building those repetitive tours that give the people the
experience and the knowledge to really take on some of the hard
things of acquisition and man training and equipping.
And so, I think there are some levers that can be pulled to
adjust the Goldwater-Nichols requirements, but then it also
needs to be done in conjunction with DOPMA. Because if you
don't adjust some of these other constraints that you have in
DOPMA, then I think you're going to impose some new problems
that you have.
So, as this is looked at, my recommendation is: look at
Goldwater-Nichols, look at DOPMA, look at the civilian force,
and how do you blend them together to get the design that will
be good for the next couple of decades. And I would submit,
after 20 or 30 years, it's probably going to be time to take a
relook again, because times will change.
Senator Rounds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator King.
Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to follow up on that exact point, Admiral, thank
you. That was a very succinct statement.
Tour lengths. A mundane question. I had the opportunity to
interview or to chat with General Dunford as he was leaving
Afghanistan a couple of years ago, and I was overwhelmed by his
level of expertise and knowledge. He knew everything about
Afghanistan, and yet he was leaving after 18 months. And I
thought, nowhere in the public sector would you do something
like this, take this amount of expertise and knowledge and say,
``Okay, time's up, you've got to go up to Sheboygan.''
Talk to me, Mr. Rostker, about tour lengths. Could we--and
how much money could we save if we just made tours 4 years
instead of 3 years? I mean, the cost of moving people, is it--
are we--is this a remnant of a prior manner of thinking? Is
there--are there ways to adjust this, both to save money and
also to maintain expertise?
Dr. Rostker. If you made that change, you'd get an
immediate savings, and it would set back into a steady- state,
and you really would not get that much savings, because the
force is still built on some notion of rotation.
Tour lengths should be handled in the same way that Dr.
Chu's talked about, as increasing the opportunity for people to
volunteer. We just finished a study for the Defense Department
in which we posed the question, Would people be willing to
extend their tours overseas? And only about 40 percent of the
population said they would. And then we asked the next
question, If you had a financial incentive, would you be
willing? And we varied the financial incentive so we could
understand what was going on. And, for very little--relatively
little money, we could get up to 60 to 70 percent of the people
to extend their tours.
So, we can use tools to better manage the Department and
have people make voluntary decisions rather than force them to
say, ``Well, now you're here and we're going to give you
another 4--another year, even if it's a bad place.'' Let people
have the opportunity to stay, and let's use reasonable
financial incentives to encourage them, where that makes sense.
And I call your attention to the Navy's outstanding program to
allow this, in initial assignments, to fill hard-to-fill areas.
We're not making use of those kinds of incentives.
Senator King. Dr. Chu, slightly changing the focus: force
structure in the 21st century. And we've--been a lot of talk
about contractors and civilians. But, it seems to me that the--
what we ought to be doing is having warfighters be warfighters.
And if that's what they're trained for, and it's very expensive
to train them, then the other functions, whether it's
maintaining the aircraft or serving the meals, should be done
by somebody other than uniformed personnel who have that
expensive and extensive training.
Dr. Chu. Sir, I couldn't agree with you more. And that
actually was an initiative of the--one of the Secretaries I had
the privilege of serving was Secretary Rumsfeld--worked hard on
looking at which functions should be carried by military
personnel, which are our most expensive asset, pure dollars-
and-cents perspective, and which ought to be performed by
civilians. And interesting, the Department made--and, in fact,
he succeeded in converting about 50,000 slots. So, the military
numbers weren't up because of these in the war, but he did
convert about 50,000 billets from military to civilian status,
which could be either Federal civilians or contractors,
depending upon the nature of the task.
Interestingly, the government does--Department does
maintain a database on this matter. This--inherently a
governmental commercial activity database, which can serve as a
guide and does argue that there's a number of positions to
which we could use civilian personnel, whether those are
Federal civilians or contractors. So, I think there's more to
be had, there. And I think that's an important--as I argue in
my testimony, it's important source of both performance
improvement and cost savings for the Department. Choose the
right mix of personnel for the task at hand.
Senator King. And as long as the contractors are managed
properly, that's one--one of the long-term bears in the room
here long-term personnel costs and the tail costs, in terms of
healthcare and pensions. If you manage contractors properly,
they bear that risk, and not the taxpayers.
Dr. Chu. Yes, sir. And I think that's one of the issues in
thinking about Federal civilians versus contractors--and back
to the issue of low performers on the Federal Civil Service.
One of the reason entities within DOD and other government
agencies find contractors so attractive, in my judgment, is
they can turn the contract on and off. If the need diminishes,
you can stop the activity. It's much harder to do that under
the U.S. Federal Civil Service practices, not necessarily the
statutes, but the way they are implemented. And I think that's
one of the issues that the committee might usefully address.
Senator King. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Senator Kaine.
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thanks, to the witnesses.
I have a--one question about recruiting and one kind of
about structural issues during the tenure of someone's service.
On the recruiting side, there was an Economist article in
late October, and the title was ``Who Will Fight the Next
War?'' And it was about difficulties in recruiting young people
into military careers. You know, even with only 1 percent
serving, so the number may be small relative to the general
population, there's been some challenges recently--I think
mostly--most of the publicity has been around the Army. But,
you know, you take the cohort of young people you're trying to
recruit, and you put out anybody who is, you know, barred
either because of academic misperformance or a felony or poor
physical conditioning, then you really whittle down the
available core. And then that available core has other
opportunities, too.
Obviously, better pay is one recruiting mechanism. But, as
you think about the recruiting needs, you know, the--we want to
continue to bring in the best and the brightest for the very
long term. What advice would you have for us as we think about
things to do, separate from the salary side? Because we can
figure that out. But, what are things that make the career an
attractive one that, from that available component of young
people, would get more to say, ``I want to make a military
career''?
Dr. Chu. I'll be delighted to start. I think I'd come back
to something that Mr. Hale emphasized, which is how the country
values the service of the individual. One of the things I
thought was very interesting in the surveys--the Department
does those surveys of young people's attitudes, as you know,
the surveys in the early part of the century--is that the
reasons cited for being interested in the military changed from
what had been true 10-20 years earlier, which had focused, in
that earlier period, on learning a skill. And it may sound a
little bit old- fashioned, but a good deal of the responses
focused on patriotic values of one sort or another. And so, I
think the way the country honors the service of the individual
and speaks to service as being a calling that is part of your
duty as a citizen, as opposed to something that is something
somebody else does, which is too much, I think, part of the
current American conversation, I think that is of enormous help
to the Department's recruiting apparatus.
Admiral Roughead. Senator, I----
Senator Kaine. Admiral Roughead.
Admiral Roughead.--as I looked at the future, the thing I
watched most were the economic predictions, because that's
what's really going to drive your recruiting. And compensation
is important, but it really is the total compensation. And how
do you deal, particularly with the force now that is more
married than when I came in--that's a significant component
that has to be taken into account.
But, with regard to the positive experience, the one thing
that we discount--and I've been through this cycle in my
career--that when you take away the means for a young
professional to properly maintain their equipment, to have the
resources to go out and do the things that they enjoy doing,
whether it's flying or being out on a submarine, or whatever,
that is huge. And, as we struggle with the departmental costs,
and as we come down on those operation and maintenance funds
that allow for proper maintenance and pride in what they do,
the opportunity to do what they love to do, cutting those funds
is going to have a significant impact. When those go up, you
can see the attitude of the force change, because they're given
the tools and the means to do that which they came in the
military to do.
Senator Kaine. Just to close the circle on that, I want to
make sure I understand your point. So, if we're dealing with
budget caps or a tough budget environment, we've tended to--
while we can't take it all out of personnel, and if we did,
we'd have to grandfather it, and we'd only see the savings way
down the road. And we can't cancel weapons acquisitions
midstream, so we tend to take it out of readiness and O&M
expenses and, you know, decrease the number of flying hours
that are available to people who want to be aviators or
decreasing the training that's available for people who want to
do that, and then that becomes kind of a demoralization factor
that either will make people not come in or maybe more likely,
when they're in, make then decide to hasten their departure.
Admiral Roughead. Yes, sir. And I go back in my earlier
days in the Navy when I had young sailors bringing their own
tools from home to maintain the equipment that they were
responsible for. When that changed, things changed
dramatically. And I--and so, this O&M dimension is more than
just how many ships you have deployed or how many airplanes
you're flying. It's much, much more substantial than that.
Dr. Hale. Senator----
Senator Kaine. Please, Mr. Hale.
Dr. Hale.--Kaine, at least in the last 5 years, we've
actually cut back primarily in the procurement areas to meet
the budget caps, in that services have tended to try to
maintain the operation and maintenance funding, I think,
because of the readiness concerns. Moreover, as I said in my
testimony, I mean, the Congress has made some changes, or
allowed changes to be made, in compensation that have freed up
funding, and, depending on the recruiting climate, some modest
additions to that may be appropriate. Because, as Admiral
Roughead said, it's not just the money, it's whether or not you
are trained, you feel you can actually operate. That's maybe
particularly true with the Reserves. Ironically, I think we
used the Reserves heavily--and I take my hat off to them--over
the last 14 years. I worry that we'll use them a lot less now,
and they want to be used in militarily meaningful ways--not all
the time, but occasionally. So, the services, I think, are
pushing hard to keep the O&M budgets up, and the Congress needs
to help them, where that's appropriate.
Senator Kaine. Thank you. I had a second question dealing
with the use of kind of a specialist designation, which I know
services have used to try to provide non-career--non-
traditional, non-up-or-out career paths, but I think I'll ask
that one for the record, since I'm over time.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman McCain. Go ahead.
Senator Kaine. Well, I just--if I could on that, several of
the military services have had a fairly extensive rank
structure known as ``specialists'' that went beyond the current
system, not so much ``up or out,'' for the recruiting of
specific technical skills. Is that something that's still done?
Should it be done more? Does that provide some of the
flexibility that a number of you have talked about in your
testimony?
Dr. Chu. Yes, absolutely. The classic case, in my judgment,
is the Army use of warrants for helicopter pilots. So, you can
aspire to a long career at the flight controls. It has a small
cadre of what we call--classically have called ``commissioned
officers'' who are prepared for the more senior
responsibilities in the enterprise. The Navy has used limited
duty officers for some elements of that. We have that in the
professions. So, the judge advocate generals corps, although--
except for what Dr. Rostker said about promotion
opportunities--career limits--but, for doctors, chaplains,
health professional service kinds, we have carved out somewhat
different paradigms over time. The Navy's supply corps is
another example of that approach.
So, there are other ways to do this. They may not be used
as aggressively and as immediately when a new issue like cyber
comes up. So, cyber comes up, we immediately turn to the line
structure as our model, not to these other opportunities as a
way to proceed, including, I might emphasize, back to Senator
King's question, Federal civilians who could hold Reserve
appointments if that becomes an important issue from a Law of
War perspective.
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks, to the witnesses.
Chairman McCain. Senator Gillibrand.
Senator Gillibrand. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On January 24th, 2013, the Secretary--then Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta announced the repeal of the Combat
Exclusion Policy. The Secretary gave the three services and
Special Operations Command until January 1, 2016, to open all
positions to women or formally request an exception to keep
certain positions closed.
Admiral Roughead, can--what can the other branches learn
about the Navy--or learn from the Navy about integrating women
once these positions are open? And we know that women attain
advanced degrees at a higher rate than men, suggesting they may
well be positioned to offer expertise to the DOD, yet about
half the women separate from the service after their first
commitment. What are the reasons women do not remain in the
military? Why do they make up such a small percentage of the
services? And how could the military better recruit and retain
women?
Admiral Roughead. Thank you very much for the question.
I think that what the Navy has done is open certain
specialties, early on, which one would classify in a combat
category. And only now are we beginning to see women rise to
positions of leadership, where young women who are coming in
the Navy today can look up and see themselves, and also having
in place the types of programs that allow family considerations
to be emphasized. And so, now we have young women coming in the
Navy that can see themselves, can see having a professional
fulfilling career, and also see their personal life fulfilled.
And it's going to take a little bit of time, but I think we
have to open up those opportunities and look at supporting both
professionally and personally as young women progress through
the ranks.
Senator Gillibrand. So, one of the supports that you've put
in place is a very good paid leave policy. Do you think that's
relevant for your ability to retain women?
Admiral Roughead. I think that that is important. One of
the things that we did during the time that I was on Active
Duty, with the help of Congress, was to put in a pilot
sabbatical program. I think that's helpful. But, it--I think
it's also important to recognize that it's not always the young
woman that will take advantage of the sabbatical. It may be
that, in a dual-service family, that the male spouse takes over
that responsibility.
Senator Gillibrand. And we've seen, in the civilian world,
that that really makes a difference. When men and women both
take paid leave, it enhances people's values to support
families overall. And it doesn't marginalize the woman because
she's the only one who ever takes time off for the dying mother
or the sick child or the new infant. So, it makes a difference
that you do encourage it to be gender- neutral, because then
you become a family-friendly place, and it's not just the women
who are being sidelined.
Admiral Roughead. Exactly. And the family will decide what
career they want to prioritize over the other. And that's----
Senator Gillibrand. At a given time.
Admiral Roughead.--a decision that they have to make, and--
--
Senator Gillibrand. Right.
Admiral Roughead.--not one that should be made by the
service.
Senator Gillibrand. Yeah. I think that's wonderful. Thank
you.
Do any of you have anything you want to say on these topics
before I move to the next topic?
[No response.]
Senator Gillibrand. Okay.
Traditionally, military training has followed a generalist
or a one-size-fits-all approach. However, technology is
becoming increasingly complex, requiring a specialized set of
skills. We have also seen emerging threats in new areas, such
as cyberwarfare. The private sector offers more money and no
requirements, like boot camp. All together, these trends
suggest that there might be a benefit for the military to
consider different models that would allow at least some of our
servicemembers to be recruited and retained in a different way.
What changes do you think would be needed, in terms of
recruiting and training personnel, to better position the
military to develop cyberwarriors? How might we better leverage
our Reserve components to address recruitment and retention of
cyberwarriors? And are there ways the military can collaborate
with the private sector to improve cybersecurity specialties
and capabilities?
Dr. Chu. Senator, I think you raised an important issue,
and it does open the door on a conversation about one matter we
have not discussed today, and that is the opportunity for
lateral entry. We do allow it for the professions--so, the
chaplains, health professionals, lawyers, that's okay. But, we
don't for the rest of the structure, as a generalization. The
Reserves are better at it, for a variety of reasons. And I
think this notion of encouraging people who are mid-career in
the civil sector to think about a period of military service
under rules that are available to the Department, or could be
made available to the Department, would be an important step
for the future.
Senator Gillibrand. Would you, for the record, give me a
letter on that describing what you would envision for lateral
service and what type of accommodations you would make. Because
I envision someone who's brilliant behind a computer that's
never going to be brilliant behind a rifle. So, I can imagine
that, when you can designate someone to be a cyberwarrior, to
be a cyberdefender, necessarily--being in the field is not
necessary, because they can be behind a computer anywhere in
the world at any given time. So, I'd like you to be specific
about what that would look like, because I'd like to have that
for the record.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Dr. Chu. Delighted to do so. Thank you, ma'am.
Senator Gillibrand. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
Just briefly, would the witnesses agree that, although it's
a beginning, this change in the retirement system is the right
thing to do?
Dr. Chu. Yes, sir.
Dr. Rostker. Yes.
Dr. Hale. Yes.
Admiral Roughead. Yes, sir.
Chairman McCain. Thank you.
On the issue of tours, very briefly, Dr. Rostker, there's
a--different kinds of tours, as you know. There's the overseas
tour at a base in Germany, where we have the school and the
hospital, et cetera, and then we have the rotational through
our joint base in Australia. I mean, there--when we talk about
``tours,'' it's--I think we ought to define it a little bit.
And, Admiral Roughead, I'm informed that the carriers are
now on 10-month deployments. I think that's too long. And I
think it's harmful. Do you agree?
Admiral Roughead. I agree completely. We've been through
this before, and, when we talk about retention, the longer you
stretch those deployments out, the--you'll see the effect in
retention. And I would submit that the model of getting to 6-
month deployments worked out very well for us. It seemed to
strike the right balance between familiarity with the region in
which you're operating and retention.
Chairman McCain. And time in different ports is drastically
reduced, as well. It's too tough on these people and their
families, this kind of separation. And maybe I have some bias,
but clearly I'd--I'm even--I understand that our obligations
are expanded, but to keep people at sea for that long a period
of time, I'd be interested--maybe we can get a readout from the
Navy on what it does to retention.
Chairman McCain. Finally, could I say--I thank the
witnesses--the complexities of these issues, I'm aware of. And
I know that Jack and I appreciate it. But, this testimony
today, I think, emphasizes to me that we really have scratched
the surface, to start with; and, second of all, the--none of
these issues are simple. None of them are--that there's just a
easy solution to them. And I think your testimony today, with
the benefit of probably a century of experience on personnel
issues, has highlighted the complexities of many of these
challenges we face, and the need for us to act. But, we want to
remember the old adage about ``First, do no harm.''
So, I appreciate the witnesses here today. I appreciate
your long, many years? service to the Nation. And,
unfortunately, we will be interrogating you again in the
future.
Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 11:29 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[all]