Caitlin Lee

This report addresses the issues of promotions, tenure, and other aspects of officer career management that lend themselves to modernization. The authors identify statutory, policy, cultural, and fiscal constraints on the military departments' flexibilities to make changes; they gather service perspectives on these constraints; and they offer potential mitigation strategies.

The federal government is working to enable simple and strategic hiring practices. Toward this end, the authors identified best practices for recruiting, hiring, and compensation in 41 federal demonstration projects and alternative personnel systems that began between January 2008 and May 2019. These best practices offer solutions for agencies seeking to modernize and refine current personnel programs.

The U.S. Air Force has embarked on a new round of strategic planning under the auspices of its 2015 Strategic Master Plan (SMP). This report represents a general survey of the state of the art in strategy and planning. We found that basic concept and approach of the SMP has promise, but its emphasis on pre-set planning could obstruct, rather than facilitate, its objectives.

To assist the Air Force in its goal of increasing representation in the most-senior joint positions, this report examines which senior joint positions matter most and why, quantifies Air Force representation in those positions, and recommends how the Air Force might control factors shaping joint leader selection.

This report assesses historical cases of U.S. Air Force innovation or apparent failure to innovate: innovations in strategic reconnaissance, nuclear survivability, suppression of enemy air defenses, and precision strategic attack; and apparent failures to innovate in close air support after World War II, early efforts to defeat Soviet integrated air defenses, and airborne high-value targeting in the post Cold War era."