Balancing Rated Personnel Requirements and Inventories

For more than a decade, the Air Force has experienced shortages of rated officers. Since the early 1990s, force structure has declined over 50 percent, reducing the capacity to produce and absorb new rated officers. Requirements for rated officers have declined as well, but the Air Force has not bee...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bigelow, James H, Robbert, Albert A
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
ACTIVE DUTY
AIR FORCE PERSONNEL
BILLETS(PERSONNEL)
CAREERS
INVENTORY
Military Forces and Organizations
MILITARY RESERVES
NATIONAL GUARD
OFFICER PERSONNEL
Personnel Management and Labor Relations
REQUIREMENTS
SHORTAGES
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:For more than a decade, the Air Force has experienced shortages of rated officers. Since the early 1990s, force structure has declined over 50 percent, reducing the capacity to produce and absorb new rated officers. Requirements for rated officers have declined as well, but the Air Force has not been able to reduce nonflying rated billets (most of which are staff positions) in proportion to the force structure reductions. As a consequence, the Air Force has attempted to produce and absorb rated officers at the maximum possible rate. The effort has not been enough. At times, the overall inventory of rated officers has been sufficient to fill overall requirements, but there have always been specific categories-fighter pilots, in particular-in which large shortages have been a way of life. Even the overall picture has deteriorated in the past year or two, as new requirements have emerged for categories such as unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), new special operations forces aircraft, and the creation of Air Force Global Strike Command. In February 2009, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force chartered the Rated Staff Requirements Integrated Process Team (IPT) to recommend courses of action for (1) balancing rated staff requirements with rated inventory and (2) subsequently maintaining them in balance. Because the inventory has been made as large as possible, the IPT had to reduce the number of positions to which rated officers are assigned. However, because rated staff positions have been reviewed repeatedly and found to be valid requirements, the IPT rejected the notion of eliminating requirements. Instead, it directed the owners of rated positions?major commands, field operating agencies, direct reporting units, joint agencies, Headquarters Air Force, and the Secretary of the Air Force-to recategorize specified numbers of staff positions. The owners, in other words, were instructed to find people other than active rated officers to fill those positions.