Raymond E. Conley

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) promulgates directives, memorandums of instructions, and other guidance embracing the importance of diversity. Although demographic data have been masked for most boards making decisions about career development and promotions, the 2021 Central Professional Military Education Program Boards provided an opportunity to test the effects of unmasking the data.

The authors assess alternatives for a next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) across a broad set of potential characteristics and situations. They use the current Minuteman III as a baseline to develop a framework to characterize alternative classes of ICBMs, assess the survivability and effectiveness of possible alternatives, and weigh those alternatives against their cost.

A congressionally mandated review of the proposed restructuring of Air Force Materiel Command examined the proposal and its effect on life-cycle management, weapon system sustainment, and overall support to the warfighter. It also presents process improvement options to improve warfighter support and product development/support system design and operations support efficiencies, and it suggests organizational changes to facilitate their implementation.

In recent years, U.S. joint military activities have seen higher participation rates by reserve component general and flag officers, senior civilians, and senior noncommissioned officers. This report examines the preparation of these personnel for participation in joint military activities and recommends courses of action to better prepare them for joint positions.This title examines the preparation of reserve component general and flag officers, senior civilians, and senior noncommissioned officers for participation in joint military activities.

Since 2000, spending on military personnel has grown at an average annual rate of 3.3 percent. This increase in spending threatens to undermine readiness and crowd out future efforts to modernize key military capabilities. A new tool simulates how various Department of the Air Force personnel policy changes could affect spending, allowing users to view cost variances when adjusting such factors as personnel count, rank, and experience levels.

The Department of the Air Force is revamping the way it manages officer development and promotion. These changes will enhance leadership's ability to identify and develop talent at all stages of an officer's career. To help evaluate new personnel policies, the authors built a tool called the Air Force Personnel Policy Simulation Tool, which simulates effects of new personnel policies on career field health and demographic diversity.

A top priority for Gen David Goldfein, chief of staff of the Air Force, is to revitalize the squadron as the warfighting core of the Air Force. The present study used a variety of data sources and interviews with 75 squadron, group, and wing commanders to develop recommendations for how the Air Force can do this by addressing squadron commander responsibilities, improving commander preparation, and refining resource monitoring.

This report assesses the FY 2012 reorganization of the Air Force Material Command (AFMC), which was undertaken as one of the initiatives to achieve mandated budget reductions by eliminating civilian manpower positions, thus achieving cost savings. One AFMC challenge was to absorb these cuts with minimal, if any, impact on its assigned missions in part by targeting staff positions.

This report chronicles intelligence community efforts over more than half a decade to improve community-wide workforce planning and management. As decisionmakers look ahead to an era of constrained budgets, they must avoid repeating earlier workforce planning mistakes because the consequences of such mistakes can be long lasting. The tools described will help decisionmakers maintain workforce capabilities as budgets decline

Focusing primarily on the officer structure, this technical report provides a brief primer on the specialty-classification system, summarizes major changes in progress or planned, and suggests additional changes based on interviews and comparative analyses, to determine whether the existing specialty codes still provide the appropriate clustering of specialties.

Air Force units have found differences between authorized and actual numbers of personnel, partly because of deployments. Using historical and other data and interviews, the authors assessed the wing-level effects of these disparities including skill levels and personnel tempo. The recommendations include improvements in manpower bookkeeping and requirement determination, use of dynamic simulation models, and implementation of suitable metrics.