Modeling Cost and Performance for Military Enlistment Report of a Workshop (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Part I: The Context of the Enlistment Standards Project
Part I: The Context of the Enlistment Standards Project
Pages 7-34
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From page 7... ...
Phase I of the project, which concentrated on developing a variety of measures of job performance so that enlistment standards could be related to something close to actual performance on the job, included measurement specialists who designed the performance tests, local base personnel who provided logistical support for the data collection, and the more than 15,000 troops who supplied the performance data. In Phase II, econometricians worked with measurement specialists to develop a cost/ performance trade-off model that incorporated the relationship between job performance and recruit quality on one side and the relationship between recruit quality and the cost of recruiting, training, and attrition on the other.
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From page 8... ...
the collection and analysis of data from test administrations, and (3) the linking of resulting performance scores to military enlistment standards as defined by scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT)
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From page 9... ...
and IIIB (31-49~: CATEGORY IT III IV V AFQT SCORE RANGE 93 - 99 65 - 92 31 - 64 10 - 30 1 - 9 The current enlistment standards and quality goals imposed by Congress for the entire armed forces are as follows. The legislated minimum standard for high school graduates is 10; in other words, those with scores in Category V are not eligible for military service.
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From page 10... ...
PROVIDING COST/PERFORMANCE TRADE-OFFS IN LINKING ENLISTMENT STANDARDS TO JOB PERFORMANCE Phase I of the JPM Project demonstrated that reasonably high-quality measures of job performance can be developed, and that the relationships between these measures and the ASVAB are strong enough to justify its use in setting enlistment standards. But the human resource management problem is not solved by showing that recruits who score well on the ASVAB tend to score well on hands-on performance measures.
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From page 11... ...
And to improve their control over performance in the enlisted ranks, DoD and the Services need to be able to make more empirically grounded projections of their personnel quality requirements. The second phase of the JPM Project concentrated on the development of a cost/performance trade-off model to illuminate for policy makers the effects of alternative enlistment standards on performance and costs.
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From page 12... ...
Department of Defense. 1980b Implementation of New Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and Actions to Improve the Enlistment Standards Process.
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From page 13... ...
Although each Service argued that quality requirements were based on empirical analysis, the fact is that there was no formal relationship between recruit quality and force capability or readiness, and no strong link between capability and costs. The unofficial justification for high-quality recruits, it seemed, was "the more quality the better." The Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards (JPM)
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From page 14... ...
By trading off performance and costs, the model would seek optimal quality standards given a variety of manpower constraints and conditions such as force size, compensation levels, and various external considerations such as unemployment rates. By the time the JPM Project had produced an enlistment standards model, however, U.S.
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From page 15... ...
This optimistic picture was shattered in 1980, when the assistant secretary of defense for manpower reported to Congress that the ASVAB in use since at least 1976 had been misnormed. The norming error caused AFQT percentile scores to be inflated, thereby causing recruit quality levels to be overstated.
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From page 16... ...
First, although each Service had enlistment quality standards at the time, those standards were based on the relationship between quality and several surrogate measures of military performance and capability, some of which had unestablished relationships with true military performance. Initially, most Services set enlistment quality standards by validating aptitude scores against training school outcomes, which at one time had relatively good relationships with
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From page 17... ...
quality personnel, since the All-Volunteer Force and free market competition between the military and civilian jobs had been in existence for only six or seven years. Finally, no methodologies had been developed for validating enlistment standards by linking quality, job or training performance, and the cost of recruiting higher- quality personnel.
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From page 18... ...
The early Rand studies led to two preliminary conclusions. First, there was a substantial relationship between ASVAB scores and on-thejob performance tests for first-term enlistees, including the largest combat specialties.
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Although the analytic work was still under way, it was clear that the very low quality levels of the 1979 and 1980 recruits were going to be unacceptable by any standard or model. On the basis of discussions with the Services and with some input from those conducting formal analyses of quality requirements, in 1981 Congress passed legislation setting maximum limits of 20 percent Category IV and 35 percent nongraduates for new recruits.
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From page 20... ...
Figure 2 presents a summary of the basic relationship between AFQT, job experience, and hands-on performance tests developed by the JPM Project for 25 jobs in all four Services (first-term enlistees only) .5 The relationship between AFQT and hands-on performance is not as strong as that found in SThis relationship was first reported to Congress in January 1989.
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From page 21... ...
The answer to that question requires a cost/performance trade-off model, which was finally developed between 1990 and 1993 and is described in detail elsewhere in this volume. QUALITY REQUIREMENTS AND TRENDS Although there was no fully developed analytic methodology for validating enlistment standards against cost and performance criteria until the early l990s, the Services nonetheless had to set and apply enlistment standards throughout the 1980s.
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High school graduate Category l-IIIA Category IV FIGURE 3 Quality requirements (for active enlisted accessions without prior service, fiscal 1985-1989~. SOURCE: DoD report to Congress on defense manpower quality, May 1985.
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To our knowledge, neither the Services nor DoD conducted a formal quality requirements study or revised quality standards for later years, even though conditions changed dramatically with the force structure reductions beginning in 1990. Now that appropriate technical tools have been made available by the JPM Project, it would be quite easy to remedy this situation and establish new quality requirements for the new, smaller force structure of the 1990s.
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From page 24... ...
Given the reduced demand for enlisted accessions, both supply and cost considerations become more favorable for higher-quality recruits. The Services could react to this more favorable recruiting climate in one of two ways: they could keep the quality mix constant and reduce recruiting costs, or they could keep recruiting costs relatively high and increase the number of higher-quality recruits.
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From page 25... ...
In fact, the actual quality mix is quite close to the quality requirements shown in Figure 3, with the exception that the actual percentage of Category IV is about onehalf of the stated requirements. Starting in 1990, however, and coinciding with the large force reductions after 1989, the quality levels again increased sharply.
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From page 26... ...
There is very little basis in either military research or military policies since World War II to suggest that a capable military force requires threefourths of its enlistees to be from the upper half of the national distribution of vocational and mental aptitudes, or that there should be virtually no one from the lowest one-third of the distribution. Although no official quality requirements were announced after 1985, the fact that the most recent quality mix is so much higher than the 1985-1989 official requirements which were already at historic highs suggests very strongly that the fundamental quality standard is "more is better" (if not "all is best"!
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From page 27... ...
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these recruiting decisions, and indeed the new JPM cost/performance trade-off model may well justify this high-quality mix. When the supply of high-quality recruits exceeds demand, then the marginal cost of recruiting additional high-quality personnel should decline, which makes a high-quality mix more cost-effective (or at least no more costly than one with a lower-quality mix)
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From page 28... ...
FUTURE TRENDS AND ACTIVE-RESERVE ISSUES The previous sections have focused primarily on quality requirements for the active forces. This section looks to the future with a focus on the relationship between quality requirements and the active-reserve mix.6 The framework we use for this discussion is one of total force demands for enlisted military personnel for both active-duty and reserve forces.
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From page 29... ...
Indeed, it is questionable whether, for many technical occupational specialties, it would be possible to use personnel without prior service at all. Using prior-service personnel may not only be cost-effective, but may also be the only way to have certain skills and occupations in the reserve forces at a reasonable cost.
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From page 30... ...
We have shown the high quality of the active force in previous sections, but the same high quality is also found in reserve force nonprior-service accessions. Figures 9 and 10 show nonprior-service high school diploma graduate acces~ic)
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FY1993 (through March) FIGURE 9 High school diploma graduate accessions as a percentage of total acces sions.
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If reserve forces do not decline with the active force, then reserve accession demands may become large relative to the size of the prior-service pool. This would inevitably lead to shortages unless significant actions were taken.
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From page 33... ...
At that time, there was consensus that military personnel and recruiting expenditures had to be raised to meet quality requirements. Should we not also ask today, with our unprecedented levels of high quality, whether we are spending more on personnel and recruiting costs than is necessary to maintain a reasonable level of quality?
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From page 34... ...
Of even higher priority, we have suggested that it is important to use the cost/performance methods developed in the JPM Project to evaluate the current high-quality force mix that is emerging today. If a cost/performance trade-off model could defend the increases in manpower quality and costs that took place after 1980, will the JPM model justify the high levels of manpower quality and recruiting costs today?
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