Data-driven personnel decisions →

The internal, hierarchical military personnel system requires constant attention.

Large-scale data collection and analysis will eventually provide the armed forces with a far richer understanding of their human capital than has ever been available before, paving the path for the services to take a fresh look at the qualifications and skills necessary for commissioning into the military. How we choose our officers will lay the groundwork for the management of the force of the future. Given the challenges that lie ahead, it is something we cannot afford to get wrong.

Send military members to Civilian schools →

The Pentagon wants to send more officers to earn graduate degrees at top-notch civilian universities, a key piece of soon-to-be released personnel reforms that could fundamentally alter the career tracks of senior military leaders.

Having spent several years in civilian graduate school, I know how beneficial this opportunity can be. But, the issue isn't how to replace the war colleges. As long as the military operates graduate schools – Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) – it will be difficult to justify sending members to civilian institutions.

Bernanke on military service and labor market outcomes →

“The evidence appears to be that there really is not an advantage,” Bernanke told a crowd at a Brookings Institution event in Washington. “If you go into the military at age 18 — versus an identical person who stays in the private sector and takes a private sector job — 10 years later, if you leave the military, your skills and wages are probably not going to be quite as high on average as a private sector person.”

Military Officers and College Degrees →

Some have argued that jobs in the private sector have inflated degree requirements. Now, a junior officer argues in the Wall Street Journal that "a college degree in 2015 no longer signals—let alone guarantees—much of anything." And, therefore, the military should no longer require college degrees for officers. I do not find his arguments convincing.

Also, the statistics he cites likely include warrant officers which drives the percent of officers with bachelor's degrees down to 83 percent. Only by exception may a officer without a bachelor's degree hold a commission. In the Air Force, which no longer has warrant officers, all commissioned officers hold at least a bachelor's degree and nearly 60 percent hold a graduate or professional degree. And, through promotion incentives and tuition assistance, 10 percent of the enlisted population hold at least a bachelor's degree and another 24 percent have an associate's degree.

Military officer quality in the all-volunteer force →

New report from Brookings by Matthew F. Cancian and Michael W. Klein:

In this paper, we show that the quality of officers in the Marines, as measured by scores on the General Classification Test (GCT), a test that all officers take, has steadily and significantly declined since 1980.

I would like to know if the result is robust across all branches of service.

This paper analyzed the quality of the officers of one branch of the military, the Marine Corps, and found a relevant and steady decline in intelligence, as measured by GCT scores, since 1980. This decline was closely associated with an expansion of the pool of young college graduates during the same time period, which potentially diminished the overall intellectual quality of that pool.