Cost of a Military Person-Year. A Method for Computing Savings from Force Reductions

摘要

While it has long been established policy in DoD that military personnel should only be used for military-essential purposes, it has proven difficult to define a concrete boundary that delineates functions that can be performed by civilians in support of military organizations or activities from those that must be performed by military personnel. Often, a discussion of the potential conversion of a particular position or function will turn on the relative cost of a civilian versus a military billet. The presumption has long been that employing a civilian to fill a give position costs less than billeting a military person with similar capability. This work documents our findings regarding estimating the economic cost of a military person-year and should help to inform the discussion of the relative cost of military and civilian personnel. It presents a new method for estimating the cost of a military person-year and reports the specific findings that emerge when this method if applied to officers and enlisted personnel by year of service (YOS).