General and Flag Officers

The Defense Department's (DOD) draft general and flag officer requirements report asks for more new active and reserve component general and flag officer positions above their current authorizations. GAO has three concerns about DOD's draft report recommendations. First, actual requirements are unknown because the military services adjusted their recommendations on general and flag officer requirements without explanation. Second, 35 general and flag officer requirements were counted twice when the Office of the Secretary of Defense developed its draft consolidated recommendations. Third, the service studies did not fully consider the potential to convert military positions to civilian positions that may not be military-essential. If Congress provides the additional positions that DOD's draft calls for, the estimated cost increase would be about $1.2 million annually for compensation paid to the new general or flag officers and their assistants plus a relatively small amount for a one-time purchase of new office furniture and other items and another $713,000 annually for the 12 new general and flag officers provided to the Marine Corps in 1996.

GAO noted that: (1) variations of two job evaluation methodologies were readily available and were used on the 1997 general and flag officer studies; (2) both methodologies are based on subjective judgments about positions reviewed and allow management to override the results; (3) to save time, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) permitted each of the services and the Joint Staff to independently and individually study its own general and flag officer requirements with the methodology they selected; (4) although using one methodology would have been a more consistent and comparable approach than using different methodologies, the individual results would not necessarily have been much different with a single methodology, due to the inherent subjectivity involved; (5) accordingly, GAO does not believe that much would be gained by redoing the services' and Joint Staff's studies; (6) GAO believes that some adjustments to DOD's draft report are in order, however; (7) GAO was concerned that: (a) actual requirements were unknown since the service secretaries adjusted their respective service study recommendations on general and flag officer requirements without explanation; (b) 35 general and flag officer requirements were counted twice when OSD developed its draft consolidated recommendations; and (c) the service studies did not fully consider the potential to convert military positions to civilian positions that may not be military-essential; (8) if Congress provided the additional general and flag officer positions that DOD's draft recommendations called for, the estimated increase in cost would be $1.2 million annually for compensation paid to the new general or flag officers and assistants plus a relatively small amount for the one-time purchase of new office furniture and other items and another $713,000 annually for the 12 new general and flag officers provided to the Marine Corps in 1996; (9) GAO's estimate is conservative because DOD provided no information about nine new active component general or flag officer positions and incomplete information about new reserve positions; and (10) in its draft report, DOD committed to eliminating as many colonels'/Navy captains' positions as it is creating for brigadier generals/rear admirals (lower half), although there is no mechanism that would cause that substitution to occur automatically.

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.

Director: Team: Phone: