The Sailor’s Creed trumpets a proud tradition of fighting “to defend freedom and democracy around the world.” However, the U.S. military is largely socialistic. Salaries are uniform by rank and are independent of the job performed. The government provides health care and housing. Personnel and property are centrally controlled. The dissonance between the freedom our military defends and the socialism it practices is not only damaging to our military’s effectiveness, it is antithetical to American values. It is time to bring the talent management policies of the Department of Defense (DoD) closer to the ideals it defends.
In his 2011 viral article “Why Our Best Officers are Leaving,” Tim Kane struck a chord that reverberated across the DoD. Kane doubled down with the 2012 publication of his book “Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution.” Kane presents troubling statistics about the officer corps’ falling retention rates in the first decade of the Global War on Terror. His own survey provided damning evidence that it wasn’t the war that caused retention to fall: it was overwhelmingly the sense by junior officers that the military mismanages personnel in virtually every way imaginable.
The military’s talent mismanagement begins with each service’s personnel evaluation system. Fundamentally, these prioritize seniority and timing over merit, measuring individuals not so much by their performance as by their relative position in a year group. Worse, the evaluation systems force officers into a moral gray area where they’re left “pretending to write objective assessments that are actually amplified self-promotional advertisements.” The evaluations become less a reflection of the individual’s merit and more a reflection of their savvy in writing a FITREP and, combined with other flaws in the system, “delinks merit from the measure of merit.”
Rigidly siloed career paths amplify the failures of the evaluation system and assume that the end objective of every officer’s career is making command, then major command, and with a bit of luck, stars on their shoulder boards. But what about the officers for whom that isn’t the desired end? The “up or out” system ensures that innovative “outside the box” thinkers, problem solvers who buck the bureaucracy, risk-takers who suffer even a single failure—the very people most likely to succeed when dynamic, competent, and energetic leadership is needed—are not likely to stay in service long enough to lead where and when it matters most.
As an example, a brilliant and capable naval aviator known to this author left the “golden path” to pursue opportunities to use his knowledge of software engineering and UAVs. He led a team, recognized for its excellence by then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis, that tackled some of the most urgent challenges involving small UAVs used by and against American forces. His team’s work was credited with saving the lives of special operations personnel and helping them accomplish their high-risk missions. He was involuntarily separated from active duty in February 2020 due to his failure to promote as a pilot. The Navy (and the DoD) lost a talented and dedicated officer with a unique skill set. On the upside, he is now reaping the rewards of his talent in a private sector career.
While some may point to the ability to lateral transfer to another community, the lateral transfer process is deeply flawed in that its structure is designed “for fairness above all; that is, to avoid lawsuits.”[1] The process forces a rank order preference by the transferees, then gives the receiving communities a priority order and lets them choose who they want. Bartering and open dialogue about preferences is formally forbidden. This ensures that a few people and units get exactly what they want, but also ensures many people and units are dissatisfied, with far below optimal distribution of talent. Even if the aforementioned aviator could have transferred to a new community, he would have been forced into its rigid training pipeline, slaving away to earn a warfare pin and various required qualifications—all the while not working on the thing for which he is especially valuable to the Navy. In short, centralized control of officer careers “in an evolving, dynamic strategic environment” cannot work. “It just pretends to.”
Some in the Navy have made direct attempts to shake up the talent management system. Not surprisingly, these innovations tend to die from the crushing force of bureaucratic inertia. A U.S. Naval Institute article in August 2019 accused the Navy of “killing its most promising talent management initiatives through inaction, bureaucracy, and a nonexistent implementation strategy.” Recent changes to the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, which Kane calls “the root of all evil in this ecosystem,” were laughably described as revolutionary. Carving out rare exceptions to the rigid system of promotions, modifying some provisions of the up-or-out rules, and dangling the promise of spot promotions pass for revolutionary change in a bloated bureaucracy.
It is time for an overhaul of DoD talent management: pragmatically and morally, the best course of action is to implement a free labor market wherein individuals apply for jobs that interest them, and commanding officers hire the best available candidates.
This seismic shift is guaranteed to generate backlash and nay-sayers. Those cynics would be wise to remember that Congress initially rejected the idea of an all-volunteer force as unworkable. Just as desegregation was a morally necessary step in the progress of our military, so too was the move from conscription to an all-volunteer force a necessary step for the government to remain in stride with the evolution of our republic. It is now time for the next necessary step: true freedom in the military labor market.
For those to whom such a proposition sounds shocking and unworkable, let’s consider what the career of a prospective naval aviator might look like in a free labor market.
A newly minted ensign has her eyes set on flying the F-35. Instead of being “slated” for aviation (as in the current paradigm), this ensign (let’s call her Ensign Jones) applies for a slot at Aviation Preflight Indoctrination (API) in Pensacola, Florida, via an online portal where applicants fill out questionnaires, take aptitude tests, and submit vision testing records. Selected for API, Jones proceeds to Pensacola where she joins a class and gets to work. At each decision point of flight training (API graduation, completion of primary flight training, etc.) instead of submitting a “dream sheet” and hoping that the “needs of the Navy” align with her merit and desires, Jones applies to the squadrons that she knows are the requisite stepping stones toward Wings of Gold and the opportunity to fly the F-35.
In this free labor market, some training wings and squadrons offer bonuses for high performance, others offer higher base pay to compensate for their less-desirable locations. Still others, knowing that the demand for their product (trained aviators) is much less than the supply (willing students), take advantage of the flexibility the Navy allows and pay the minimum allowed salary with no bonuses. Ensign Jones chooses to prioritize her desire to fly F-35s above all else.
Jones excels at flight training and breezes through API, primary flight training at VT-6, advanced flight training at VT-7, and earns her Wings of Gold about two years after commissioning. She applies to VFA-125, and as a backup to VFA-122. To her dismay, Jones learns that VFA-125 isn’t accepting applicants for the next six months due to a surplus of students and VFA-122 declined to offer her a job, citing two incidents of acute airsickness she experienced while flying the T-45. (This is an example of the freedom to hire or not hire that commands would have in a free market.) She faces a choice: languish without pay for six months and hope to be hired by VFA-125 or look for another opportunity.
She decides that maritime fixed wing platforms offers some appealing opportunities and applies to VP-30 and VQ-7, hoping for a chance to fly either the P-8 or E-6. With her sterling resume as a student naval aviator, she is offered jobs at both squadrons. Now to decide. Based solely in Oklahoma City, the E-6B offers the potential for better stability for her family life, lower cost of living, and a nice premium on base pay to compensate for the generally less desirable platform, mission, and location. The P-8 squadrons, on the other hand, are more dispersed, with overseas deployments and homeports on both U.S. coasts. Those squadrons don’t offer salary premiums, but per diem and tax benefits are likely to add up with overseas deployment opportunities.
Ensign Jones and her spouse move to the heartland and join the TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out) community. Promoted to lieutenant junior grade at VQ-7, she completes training and applies to operational squadrons VQ-3 and VQ-4. She is hired at VQ-4, promoted to lieutenant, and embarks on three years of operational training and flying. Recommended for department head (DH) and with all the requisite qualifications, Lieutenant Jones would only have two choices in the Navy’s current paradigm: return as an instructor to the fleet replacement squadron (VQ-7) and follow the “golden path” to DH and command, or leave the “golden path” and almost inevitably be passed over for promotion twice and involuntarily separated from service. But in a free labor market, Jones now has choices: she can follow the traditional “golden path” if she chooses. Alternatively, she can choose to take a break from flying and go to an ROTC unit to teach while earning a graduate degree; or she can apply for any other Navy job in which she is interested. Of course, she will be hired based on her merits, not on the mechanizations of a grindingly impersonal bureaucracy. And as in the private sector, Jones knows that her choice of jobs will have implications for future opportunities, making her more attractive for some and less for others.
The key in this new paradigm is that the second choice would not—and should not—be the death of her career. In a free labor market, all sailors should be able to apply for any job within one paygrade of their current rank. Promotion—and even demotion—should be controlled by the hiring command. If for example Jones completes a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering while an ROTC instructor and then desires to return to flying, why shouldn’t she be afforded the opportunity to apply to VQ-7 as an instructor, or to one of the operational squadrons? In either case, she should be allowed to apply for a lieutenant billet (with the accompanying pay and responsibilities) or a lieutenant commander billet with the accompanying rewards and expectations of a department head. If the Navy trusts commanding officers, they should be empowered with a talent management staff and be allowed to hire personnel based on the merits of the applicants. Some baseline parameters should be set (minimum acceptance of students from the FRS, caps on “super-JO” tours for lieutenants returning to a flying billet, limits to pay premiums, mandatory ranks for certain billets, limits to bonuses, etc.). But the best tool for getting the right people in the right jobs is the free market.
And why couldn’t this work with all ranks, or at least up to O-6? Shouldn’t a highly motivated lieutenant commander be able to apply for an O-5 billet and be hired and promoted based on merit? Why shouldn’t a commander be allowed to apply for an O-4 billet (and voluntarily accept the demotion) to get back in the cockpit instead of taking an O-5 staff job? Navy Personnel Command, in this new paradigm, would be a shell of its current staff, with its primary purpose being to provide training for talent management professionals; to collect, analyze, and report talent management data; and to provide support to the talent management professionals embedded in every unit whose commander has court-martial convening authority. If a commanding officer can fire someone via court-martial, why shouldn’t he or she be able to hire someone?
In this new paradigm, individuals will have greater opportunity to flourish—and fail—based on their merits. Units and their commanders will have the freedom to select the candidates who best fit both the culture of the command and requirements of the mission. The services will benefit from units with higher degrees of cultural cohesion, commanders whose selection is weighted toward merit instead of seniority and timing, and individuals who perform with the confidence of those who know that merit—not mere chance or timing—has placed them among their peers.
In time, the protestations of opponents will sound as backward as those who advocated segregation and conscription. In the real world, people apply for jobs and show off their experience, ability, education, and potential in hopes of getting the right job in the right place with the right people. In turn, employers review all applicants and pick the best they can afford, given varying and numerous constraints. The proper balance of incentives, pay, rank, and authority are optimally handled by the invisible hand of the market with limited oversight and diktats from a central authority. It’s past time for the DoD to abandon the totalitarian model of centralized control of manpower and at long last, let freedom ring. Isn’t that what we are fighting for anyways?
Endnotes
[1] This quote is from an officer community manager who spoke frankly on the topic with this author and will not be named.
