monopsonies.

Rather than using bureaucratic and centralized boards to review formal evaluations, other professions use open and informal processes—résumés and letters of recommendation. And it’s not as if other professions, say, medicine, for example, are wild, free, unregulated markets. Quite the opposite. Medical professionals must be licensed and certified,

The inability to adjust pay on an individual basis ties directly to the heart of the personnel dilemma facing the Pentagon. Moving from a central-planning system to a market is fraught with uncertainty, as we know from the recent history of Eastern European countries. But at the center of the Gordian knot is how to match supply with demand, whether

Survey after survey of active-duty troops—in wartime and peacetime—reveal decades of frustration with HR policies that remain in place. Bleeding talent through retention is only the superficial symptom seen by the media and public, but active-duty troops know that internal bleeding of mismanaged talent is even worse. Innovative, outspoken, and

Dick Hewitt

the only way to try to allocate resources through a central-planning solution is by using simplified data.

the AVF is not exactly all volunteers, or at least not all the time. A better name is probably the “first-day volunteer force,” because after men and women take their oath of office on the first day in uniform, the volunteerism ends.

If leadership depends purely on seniority you are defeated before you start. You give a good leader very little and he will succeed; you give mediocrity a great deal and they will fail. —George C. Marshall, 1941, to the Truman Committee

“The OER has always been prone to inflation by officers wanting to project their officers as the best, or because the raters or senior raters did not have the moral courage to face their officers with average or below average OERs that would destroy their careers.