Fred L. E. Stewart, CPT
The Military’s outmoded manpower and personnel systems rose to the surface in 1998, when a booming economy, coupled with the end of the military’s post – Cold War downsizing led to overall personnel shortages and staffing imbalances across occupations within the armed services (Williams, 2004). As the downsizing ended, military recruiters, newly tasked with stepping up the flow of enlistments after several years of limited requirements missed their targets of skilled labor and recruits by thousands (General Accounting Office (GAO), 2000). It appears that from that point on the Military has sought to develop competency-based manpower systems coupled to integrated human resource systems in order to evolve and solve both the manpower dilemma and the deficiency in skills training. Is the intent to capture and catalogue specific competency data? Can organizational tasks for the purpose of optimizing talent across the services be utilized to attract and keep qualified candidates, which as it turns out was one of its greatest challenges since even before the Global War on Terrorism. Could competencies be used to develop better training and education?