Managing Military Personnel Costs: Operation Retrenchment Specter, A Workforce Futures Game

Abstract

The military personnel (MILPERS) budget provides financial resources to compensate active-duty personnel. This includes pay and allowances, health care and retirement pay accruals, permanent change of station (PCS) travel, and other MILPERS costs. Spending on MILPERS has grown at an average annual rate of 3.3 percent since fiscal year (FY) 2000 to approximately $36 billion in FY 2021. Along with the growth of the MILPERS budget, the average cost of an airman has increased. After normalizing for the size of the workforce, the average cost of an airman increased by 106 percent from FY 2000 to FY 2021. By comparison, civilian pay grew by only 60 percent during the same period. The increased cost of personnel threatens to undermine the Department of the Air Force's (DAF's) ability to field a ready workforce, and the resulting growth in the MILPERS budget threatens to divert resources from modernization and sustainment efforts. To limit the growth of the MILPERS budget, the DAF must systematically evaluate a variety of policy options and then select policies that control personnel costs without increasing risks to mission and force. This requires an enterprise-wide perspective. To advance such a perspective, RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF) conducted a workforce futures policy game Operation Retrenchment Specter - with the U.S. Air Force's (USAF's) most senior human resources leader, other senior leaders, and more than 50 USAF participants. Teams competed to generate novel options to limited MILPERS costs without incurring unacceptable risks. To ensure that the game construct reflected real-world trade-offs accurately, teams used a modeling ecosystem to simulate the monetary and nonmonetary effects of workforce and personnel policy changes. This report describes the game and the options that teams generated.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 14, 2023
Accession Number
AD1203426

Entities

People

  • Lisa M. Harrington
  • Matthew E. Walsh
  • Thomas Light

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Cyber
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Business Administration
  • Cost Reductions
  • Data Analysis
  • Department Of Defense
  • Economic Analysis
  • Education
  • Employment
  • Enlisted Personnel
  • Families (Human)
  • Financial Management
  • Health Care
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Education
  • Military Personnel
  • National Security
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel Management
  • Recruiting
  • Space Force

Readers

  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Public Financial Management and Budgeting
  • Strategic Security Studies