Flexible Management

The effectiveness and integrity of recruiting programs in the armed services are influenced to a very large degree by policy and resource allocation decisions made within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the service headquarters. If recruiting managers and other involved officials have increased flexibility to appropriately adapt policy and resources to ever-changing conditions of market supply and demand, recruiting goals can be accomplished and malpractice and other irregularities reduced. A GAO review critiqued five management factors in decisionmaking processes involving OSD and service staff relationships.

Perhaps the greatest stumbling block to achieving recruiting goals is the inflexibility inherent in the management of service recruiting programs. This inflexibility is particularly evident in: (1) the absence of readily available nonmonetary policy-change alternatives which can be used as management tools within existing funding levels; and (2) the insistence that the recruiting objectives be fixed well in advance, although properly matching recruiting resources and nonmonetary policies to these goals is generally not possible because of the uncertainties of congressional action and the recruiting marketplace. In addition, the requirement for all services to obtain congressional committee approval for spending additional recruiting funds through reprogramming, no matter how small the amount, hinders management's ability to quickly adjust its recruiting program to developing problems.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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