RAND Hits A Home Run

RAND reports are hit and miss with me, but the RAND study Succession Management for Senior Military Positions, The Rumsfeld Model for Secretary of Defense Involvement released today by Andrew R. Hoehn, Albert A. Robbert, Margaret C. Harrell is remarkably well done. From the news release.

The study reviews senior leader selection and succession planning in general, describes the process developed by Rumsfeld, and investigates how the process evolved after Rumsfeld left office. Hoehn and his colleagues do not reach any "best practice" conclusions but highlight the characteristics of various processes and offer suggestions on key attributes that future defense department leaders might want to consider as they contemplate how senior officer selection and assignments will be managed.

A teaser from the study.

When Rumsfeld began his second tenure as Secretary of Defense, he perceived several fundamental problems with the processes used to choose senior military leaders to be recommended for higher rank or additional assignments. First, he perceived a lack of explicit criteria for each position that should guide the selection of the most appropriate candidate. Second, he found that, although each service was required by law to submit at least one nominee for joint four-star vacancies, the services were not consistently offering viable candidates. Instead, the services appeared to be submitting strong candidates only when they perceived that it was their “turn” to fill a position in an understood pattern of job rotations or when the position had traditionally been filled by the service. Rumsfeld found the lack of both explicit criteria and a truly competitive process for filling the most senior military positions to be in conflict with his management philosophy. He also felt it important to challenge the services to provide the very best candidates for all three- and four-star assignments.

There are several key aspects of the process that Rumsfeld introduced. First, the decisions involved four key decisionmaking members: the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although the final decision belonged to the Secretary of Defense, all accounts suggest that the discussions held by this group, which became known informally as the personnel committee, did inform—and sometimes change—the final decision. It is important to note that the military chiefs were not included in this small group of decisionmakers.

Good stuff!