Developing Cost-Effectiveness Guidelines for Managing Personnel Resources in a Total Force Context. Executive Summary.

摘要

Over half of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget is attributable to the pay and support of its work force--the active and reserve forces, civil servants, and private sector contractors providing direct labor services. This work force supplies manpower for peacetime operations and an inventory of human resources for potential wartime operations. In a period of fiscal austerity, managing this labor force to meet defense capability goals while minimizing costs is a major policy issue. In previous research, we developed a Total Force Management (TFM) modeling approach for determining the most cost-effective combination of active, reserve, and civilian manpower consistent with specified wartime and peacetime defense objectives. The TFM approach differs from conventional methods of analyzing manning decisions--which compare active and reserve manning for wartime activities or active and civilian manning for peacetime activities--by recognizing that most defense activities would be conducted in both wartime and peacetime and that active duty military personnel are readily available to meet labor demands in both those environments. An earlier TFM report (Palmer and Rydell, 1989) showed that, under reasonable cost and performance conditions, active duty personnel can substitute for a combination of civilians doing peacetime work and reserve doing wartime work and cost less than the combination of replaced personnel. The implication is that current defense guidelines encouraging use of civilian manpower whenever possible might not be cost-effective.