Force Structure

GAO is required to assess annually the Army's efforts to streamline infrastructure and eliminate the inefficient use of personnel assigned to infrastructure activities. This report examines the extent to which the Army has (1) taken corrective actions to resolve its material weakness in determining institutional personnel requirements and (2) identifies opportunities to reduce personnel and realize savings through its Force XXI Institutional Redesign effort. GAO also discusses whether these initiatives are producing the results necessary for the Army to improve the efficiency of its institutional workforce.

GAO noted that: (1) the Army developed a corrective action plan to resolve its material weakness in determining institutional personnel requirements but may have difficulty achieving the plan's completion date; (2) two critical subplans have been developed, one that implements a new costing system and another that develops a new computer-based methodology--the Army Workload Performance System (AWPS); (3) without specific steps and milestones for both of these efforts, the Army lacks the tools it needs to ensure that the plan will be completed by December 1999; (4) milestones for both efforts have slipped from original estimates, and in the case of the computer-based methodology, the Army has missed some of its interim goals; (5) in addition, a plan initiative to ensure that major commands use a 12-step methodology to analyze workload may not be implemented on time unless more personnel are assigned to the office responsible for this effort; (6) the Army's institutional redesign effort has not resulted in a reduction in major command headquarters, and the dollar and position savings identified are overstated; (7) one redesign initiative resulted in the redesignation of a major command as a subcommand; (8) however, the Army also created a new command, resulting in no net decrease in the number of commands; (9) also, the Army transferred a command but did not recognize it to achieve efficiencies; therefore, this effort produced virtually no decrease in the command's 9,000 positions; (10) the Army transferred about 2,800 active Army positions from institutional to operational forces based on two initiatives, but these initiatives did not produce the anticipated savings, and personnel cuts had to be made elsewhere; (11) the Army's efforts to establish workload-based requirements and redesign institutional functions have produced few results; (12) Army personnel trend data from 1992-2003 show that the Army has not been successful in reducing the proportion of institutional to operating forces within the active Army; (13) in addition, the Army does not currently have a workload basis for allocating its personnel resources among institutional organizations and ensuring that the highest priority functions are funded first; (14) as a result, the Army may not have the analysis it needs to efficiently allocate many of the institutional positions that are programmed to be eliminated by fiscal year 2003 or additional reductions mandated by the Quadrennial Defense Review; and (15) without senior leadership attention, the Army's current initiatives may not achieve meaningful and measurable changes.

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: