The US Army enlisted personnel system: a system dynamics approach

The United States Army's enlisted personnel strength management system consists of several planning and operations processes within multiple command organizations. Within this framework, planners on the staffs of the Department of the Army develop policies and goals to achieve annual Congressionally-mandated manning levels within budgetary constraints. These policy decisions significantly affect recruiting, training, and manning the Army. Separate models and information systems are linked to provide decision support; however, no single model captures the impacts of a policy across the entire enlisted personnel system. Classical approaches to the analysis and modeling of personnel systems ignore the effects of feedback and usually require a priori specification of mathematical relationships. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive systems model using a system dynamics approach to evaluate personnel strength management policies. We demonstrate the power of such an approach through analysis of several personnel policy issues.