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The defense acquisition workforce (AW) comprises military personnel, civilian employees of the Department of Defense (DoD), and contractors who perform functions that are related to the acquisition of goods and services for DoD. In 2006, the RAND National Defense Research Institute began a collaboration with DoD to develop data-based tools to support analysis of the organic defense AW, which includes military and DoD civilians, but not contractors. In response to the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA) of 1990, DoD has been tracking and reporting on the AW since 1992. The AW is responsible for planning, design, development, testing, contracting, production, introduction, acquisition logistics support, and disposal of systems, equipment, facilities, supplies, or services that are intended for use in, or support of, military missions. A key role of the AW is to oversee the acquisition process. Military and DoD civilian personnel who fulfill one or more of these roles are flagged as being part of the AW. Members of the AW can be found in many different organizations across DoD.

Under 10 U.S.C. 115b (National Defense Authorization Act Fiscal Year 2010, Section 1108), the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness has responsibility for developing and implementing the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD's) strategic workforce plan, in consultation with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. In keeping with the legislative requirements, DoD seeks to accelerate improvements to the department s workforce data, forecasting methods, tools, and analysis to develop a comprehensive, measurable planning process that drives strategic human capital management decisions within the Total Force construct. To achieve this aim, DoD needs to improve upon the tools available to analyze the civilian workforce DoD-wide and develop the data resources and capacity to engage in total workforce analysis. Workforce planning can be defined as having the right number of people with the right set of skills and competencies in the right job at the right time (Vernez et al., 2007). The basic goal is to close any gaps between the human resources an organization needs to carry out its mission (demand) and the human resources it has (supply). Effective workforce planning not only aids organizations in using resources effectively and ensuring that the organization has the staff needed to accomplish its objectives; it also can help organizations identify and mitigate workforce risks.

The defense acquisition workforce (AW) is charged with providing the Department of Defense (DoD) with the management, technical, and business capabilities needed to oversee defense acquisition programs from start to finish. This workforce comprises military personnel, civilian employees of DoD, and contractors who perform functions related to the acquisition of goods and services for DoD. In 2006, RAND National Defense Research Institute began to collaborate with DoD to develop data-based tools that would support analysis of the organic defense AW, which includes military personnel and DoD civilian employees, but not contractors. RAND published a report in 2008 (Gates et al., 2008) that documented the construction of the data set and the analytical methods used to examine these data. That report provided descriptive analyses of the organic AW based on data through FY 2006. This report updates Gates et al., 2008, by documenting revisions to the study methods, providing descriptive information on the AW through fiscal year (FY) 2011, and providing a user s manual for a projection model that can help managers explore what shape the AW could take in 2021 under different assumptions about the future. The value of the model and resulting projections is not so much in the specific numbers the model provides (including the examples presented in this report) but in the insights that managers can gain by manipulating the model to examine the possible effects of changes to the model parameters. To illustrate this value, we present some practical examples that describe how a manager can use the model to explore alternative assumptions about future workforce turnover or workforce management practices by modifying some of the default gain and loss rates in the model, which are based on the five-year historical averages. The examples illustrate the implications of such changes for the projections.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) asked the RAND National Defense Research Institute to study the effects that using the Reserve Components (RCs) as an operational force can have on employers. The study involved the review and analysis of existing research and data related to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) (Pub. L. 103- 353, 1994) and the effects that employee absences more generally have on employers, focus groups with employers, interviews with RC chiefs, and a legal and legislative history review of USERRA. Study findings are presented in Gates et al., 2013. This document consists of technical appendixes that provide detailed information on the underlying analyses we conducted to develop the findings in the main report. The more-detailed information contained in these appendixes will be of interest to policymakers in DoD and the U.S. Department of Labor who are interested in specific issues or in the underlying methodology used by the research team. It will also be of interest to researchers., See also ADA582850.

Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR), a U.S. Department of Defense office (DoD), asked the RAND Corporation to study the implications that using the Reserve Components (RCs) as an operational force can have for employers in view of employment rights protections for RC members. Specifically, ESGR wanted to know whether changes are needed to the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), 1994 legislation designed to prevent hiring discrimination and bolster job protection for members of the armed forces, including those of the RCs; ESGR support programs; or RC activation and deployment policies, given the increased mobilization of the National Guard and Reserve and the continuing need to balance the rights, duties, and obligations of employers, RC members, and RC members families. The study involved the review and analysis of existing research and data related to USERRA and the effects on employers of employee absences more generally, an analysis of the 2011 DoD National Survey of Employers, focus groups with employers conducted in 2012, interviews with RC chiefs conducted in 2011, and a legal and legislative history review of USERRA. This report describes key findings from the analysis., See also ADA582851.

In today's defense environment, pressure is growing on policy makers to make the defense acquisition system more nimble and effective. To help, prior to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the RAND Corporation was asked to prepare a series of white papers as part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense's effort to provide the next administration with guidance on defense acquisition challenges in several areas likely to be of critical importance to the new defense acquisition leadership: competition, risk management, novel systems, prototyping, organizational and management issues, and the acquisition workforce. These efforts led to six occasional papers that offer thought-provoking suggestions based on decades of RAND and other research, new quantitative assessments, a RAND-developed cost-analysis methodology, and the expertise of core RAND research staff. This monograph, a compilation of those six papers, is designed to inform new initiatives for markedly improving the cost, timeliness, and innovativeness of weapon systems that DoD intends to acquire. Findings from this research include the following: Savings from Competition Are Not Inevitable; DoD Must Accept More Risk to Meet Demand for Novel Systems; Oversight Is Based on Dollar Value, Irrespective of Risk; Organizational Schisms and Rigid Processes Contribute to Inefficiencies; Evidence of the Benefits of Prototyping Is Mixed; and DoD Lacks Systematic Data on the Acquisition Workforce.

Today's defense environment is placing growing pressure on defense policy makers to be nimble and adaptive, particularly with respect to acquisition systems and processes. This occasional paper is one in a series drawing upon the expertise of core RAND Corporation staff to explore issues and offer suggestions on topics that are likely to be of critical importance to the new leadership: the use of competition, development of novel systems, prototyping, risk management, organizational and management issues, and the acquisition workforce. The papers are designed to inform new initiatives for markedly improving the cost, timeliness, and innovativeness of weapons systems that the Department of Defense (DoD) intends to acquire. This paper assesses the evidence regarding whether and to what extent specific workforce issues contribute to poor acquisition outcomes in DoD. It describes key concerns about the size, mix, and quality of the defense acquisition workforce, and provides an overview of the workforce and the policy environment influencing its management. It also assesses the strength of the evidence supporting these key concerns, arguing that the information available on workforce size, mix, and quality is insufficient to assess whether more workers, more highly skilled workers, or a different mix of workers would improve acquisition outcomes. We highlight areas where better evidence is needed to understand the linkage between workforce attributes and acquisition outcomes, and recommend steps for assembling the information needed to make, refine, or dismiss the case for major new hiring or training initiatives. The following three workforce-related claims feature most prominently in the current debates: (1) the current workforce is too small to meet the current workload, (2) DoD overuses or inappropriately uses contractors to perform acquisition functions, and (3) the workforce lacks the skills to accomplish the workload.

While workforce issues in general - human capital strategic planning efforts in particular-are important throughout the DoD, the AT&L workforce has received special attention. The strategic human capital plan for the AW, which is currently in its third revision (see DoD, Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2007), emphasizes several critical workforce issues: the eventual loss of retirement-eligible personnel and their knowledge, understanding the differences in the workforce generations (aging baby-boomers compared with Generations X and Y, for example), and coping with the increasing demand for workers educated in science and engineering. In 2006, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Director of Human Capital Initiatives (OUSD(AT&L)/HCI)), asked RAND to analyze DoD AW data. RAND's findings for OUSD(AT&L/HCI) are presented in Gates er al. (2008). While that inquity was under way, the United States Navy asked RAND to under-take a complementary analyis focusing on the DoN's civilian AW. The DoN asked RAND to provide a descriptive overview of the DoN civilian AW and conduct preliminary analyses of data related to specific workforce management issues of retention, professional development, and leadership. This report summarizes what we learned about DoN's civilian AW and these workforce management issues.

The U.S. military child care system is the largest employer-sponsored child care system in the nation, widely recognized for providing high-quality care. A range of different settings enables the system to meet military parents' needs for reliable, high-quality care while recognizing parental preferences concerning environment, size (the number of children cared for in that provider setting), and flexibility. Subsidies based on family income ensure affordability. Despite its size, the military child care system serves only a small percentage of eligible families needing child care assistance. Care in Child Development Centers (CDCs) is quite costly for DoD to provide; care for the youngest children is particularly expensive since parent fees are based on family income and not on the cost of care. Care in Family Child Care (FCC) homes is substantially less costly. There is little evidence that the care provided in DoD-run CDCs and FCC homes addresses DoD employer goals of increased readiness, retention, and recruitment. Moreover, families that cannot or choose not to use CDC or FCC care receive no help covering their child care expenses. Moreover, they may rely on care that is mediocre, given their often limited financial resources and the fact that the average quality of care in civilian communities is generally not high. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness asked RAND researchers to use the insight they have gained during several previous studies on military child care to reexamine military child care as a compensation issue and evaluate options for transforming the current military child care system. In this paper, we provide an overview of the military child care system and assess the system's success in cost-effectively meeting DoD readiness, retention, and recruitment goals. In particular, we consider the logic of DoD offering military child care as an in-kind benefit., ISBN 978-0-8330-4414-3.

The Department of Defense now faces the challenge of responding to the imminent retirement of a large proportion of its civilian workers and the impending U.S. military transformation that will likely require a larger civilian workforce to support a new force structure. One way in which DoD plans to address this challenge is through recruiting "the best talent available." In its efforts to determine effective ways to recruit such workers, DoD asked the RAND Corporation to look at intern programs, characterizing DoD's current intern programs, identifying best practices for intern programs among private-sector firms and other government agencies, and recommending approaches for improving such programs. This monograph describes RAND's response, presenting and synthesizing insights and findings from interviews the authors conducted with managers of DoD and corporate intern programs, from a review of literature on intern programs, and from analyses of personnel data, and making specific DoD policy recommendations.

The recently passed No Child Left Behind legislation reflects the increasing visibility and importance of school administration in the larger education reform effort. But just when the role of school administrators is being emphasized, policymakers and the public are becoming increasingly concerned that there is or soon will be a short- age of qualified individuals to fill formal school and district management positions. This concern stems primarily from the perception that a large number of people are leaving school administrative positions, that districts are having a hard time replacing those who leave, and that replacements often lack the skills necessary to succeed in school administration. To know whether the United States is indeed facing a crisis in the recruitment and retention of school administrators, the Wallace-Readers Digest Funds asked RAND to conduct a systematic analysis of the career patterns of school administrators, including the moves they make into and out of the profession and the factors that might be expected to influence those moves.

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) provides finance services (such as paying military members, government-employed civilians, and contractors) and accounting services (such as tabulation and analysis of customer obligations and expenditures) to Department of Defense (DoD) customers This report examines the DFAS pricing structure and its impact on customer incentives and behavior. We believe the DFAS pricing structure is important on two levels. First, with approximately $2 billion in expenditures per year, DFAS itself is a sizable portion of the DoD infrastructure Second, we believe the pricing issues that DFAS confronts are similar to those faced by other Defense Working Capital Fund (DWCF) organizations, including the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the Defense information Systems Agency (DISA), the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), and the military services' depot systems. Analysis of DFAS's pricing issues might therefore provide insights into the pricing structures of DoD working capital fund organizations in general Like other DWCF organizations, DFAS covers its expenditures by charging customers for its services DFAS charges per "work unit" (e.g., per account paid) for its finance services and charges by the hour for its accounting services. Hourly rates for accounting services vary by customer; finance fees generally do not Various finance products represented about half of the DFAS regions' fiscal year 2001 (FY01) expenditures, accounting represented about 40 percent of the regions' expenditures, and information services represented about 10 percent.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has developed an impressive system for delivering quality child care to the children of DoD employees. This system currently provides care to nearly 200,000 children on a daily basis, ranging in age from six weeks to 12 years. To care for these children, the DoD operates Child Development Centers (CDCs) around the world, supports a network of Family Child Care (FCC) homes, and offers before and after-school, holiday, and summer programs for school-age children. The military child-care system is the largest system of employer- sponsored child care in the country, and it has received wide recognition for the high-quality and affordable care it provides. At the same time, the DoD has been under pressure to control expenditures and has explored how the cost of support activities such as child care might be reduced. In the mid-1990s, part of this examination included discussions on the feasibility and potential value of outsourcing military child care. Although the impetus to outsource has waned as policymakers realized that there were limited opportunities for cost savings through outsourcing of child care, given the strict staffing requirements in the delivery of high-quality care, information about the cost of child care remains an important management and policy tool.

This volume is a companion to In Pursuit of Prestige: Strategy and Competition in US. Higher Education, published by Transaction Press, 2001. This companion volume contains additional detail from a two-year study of higher education in the United States. The material here is organized into five appendices. The first four appendices offer expanded analyses of the four key revenue markets treated in the main text: student enrollments, research funding, public fiscal support, and private giving. The final appendix presents an analysis of the changes in degree production over the past two decades. The material throughout this volume assumes familiarity with the conceptual framework presented in the book and readers are cautioned not to read this work independently. All references here are to the bibliography of the book.

The Office of the Chancellor for Education and Professional Development in the Department of Defense (DoD) was established in 1998 to help raise the quality of civilian training and professional development to world-class standards. The Chancellor's office is specifically charged with ensuring the quality and productivity of education and professional development activities targeted at DoD civilians. In support of this aim, the Chancellor asked RAND to review existing approaches for assessing academic quality and productivity and to suggest approaches that might be useful for the assessment of the current DoD system of education and professional development. The RAND study team conducted a broad review of the general literature on the assessment of quality and productivity in education and professional development. The team also reviewed the documentation of organizations engaged in such assessment, interviewed experts, attended conferences, and conducted site visits to exemplary organizations. This report synthesizes that information and provides suggestions for approaches that might be useful for DoD.

This work grew out of earlier research that RAND conducted for Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) leadership. That earlier work, discussed in Keating and Gates (1999), focused on DFAS's internal cost structure and the implications that cost structure held for DFAS pricing policies. Because that research focused internally, the logical next step was to focus externally, on the interactions DFAS has with its customers. The scope of the research was deliberately broad; DFAS had received customer complaints, but wanted RAND to take a comprehensive look at all of its customer interactions without preconceived ideas about where the problems lay.

Within the Department of Defense (DoD), there is great interest in competitive sourcing of activities that are not inherently governmental as a tool to reduce the cost of infrastructure activities, which account for about 60 percent of DoD expenditures. Competitive sourcing is a term describing the process through which managers consider both internal and external organizations to determine the best provider of a particular service. Analyses suggest that the government has saved about 30 percent on each position that was part of a completed competition.

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) is a defense agency created in 1991 to provide finance and accounting services (e.g., personnel and contract payments, trial balances, travel voucher handling) for the Department of Defense (DoD). DFAS agglomerated what had been service-specific facilities and personnel providing such services. DFAS is also a Defense Working Capital Fund (DWCF) activity, which recovers its operating costs through customer fees.

Within the Department of Defense (DoD) there is increasing interest in identifying ways to save costs while minimizing impact on force effectiveness. Civilianization-the transfer of functions performed by military personnel to civil service personnel-is a frequently discussed way to do this for two main reasons: (1) Military members are being moved in and out of jobs frequently, so there is high turnover as well as high training costs. (2) Military members do not spend 100 percent of their time performing a certain function; they also have training requirements and other duties. Although conventional wisdom suggests that civil service workers are cheaper than their military counterparts, there has been little analysis of this issue.

Responding to recommendations from the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is investigating opportunities to increase the scope and pace of outsourcing of commercial activities. Outsourcing can reduce the cost of commercial activities directly, by taking advantage of efficiencies found in the competitive private sector, or indirectly, by inducing activities that remain in-house to operate more efficiently. Either way, civil service employees are likely to be displaced, presenting Department of Defense (DoD) managers of the civil service workforce with a range of issues. Accordingly, OSD managers of civil service employees have an interest in predicting and understanding the effects of this intensified examination of DoD outsourcing opportunities. At the request of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Civilian Personnel Policy, RAND undertook a study to examine these effects. Findings of the study should be of interest to OSD, service, and defense agency personnel managers, especially those responsible for programs to assist displaced workers and those who have an interest in the cost and productivity of workforces. Managers of outsourcing and cost-comparison processes should also have an interest in some of the findings. This report was prepared under the sponsorship of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Management Policy. It was prepared within the Forces and Resources Policy Center of RAND's.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of concerns over whether or not school districts will be able to attract and retain enough qualified school administrators. This 258-page report, authored by Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, and Lucrecia Santibanez, takes a critical look at trends in the field, and also addresses several primary areas of concern for the future of attracting and retaining effective administrators. In the report, the authors find there is no immediate national crisis, but that there is a great deal of state and local variation in financial rewards along with significant barriers to entry into the field, and that a large percentage of current administrators are approaching retirement. Divided into seven substantial chapters (along with appendices and a bibliography), the report deals with movement within the school administrative career field, an overview of current school administrators, and mobility within the position of principal. For readers that may not have time to read the entire report, a six-page summary of findings is also provided. Thorough in its scope and directed in its focus, this report will be of great use to those in the field of educational administration and policy.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of concerns over whether or not school districts will be able to attract and retain enough qualified school administrators. This 258-page report, authored by Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, and Lucrecia Santibanez, takes a critical look at trends in the field, and also addresses several primary areas of concern for the future of attracting and retaining effective administrators. In the report, the authors find there is no immediate national crisis, but that there is a great deal of state and local variation in financial rewards along with significant barriers to entry into the field, and that a large percentage of current administrators are approaching retirement. Divided into seven substantial chapters (along with appendices and a bibliography), the report deals with movement within the school administrative career field, an overview of current school administrators, and mobility within the position of principal. For readers that may not have time to read the entire report, a six-page summary of findings is also provided. Thorough in its scope and directed in its focus, this report will be of great use to those in the field of educational administration and policy.