The Rainy Day Problem
Air Force fails to plan, Airmen caught in the crossfire
It’s been a few years since I’ve written regularly about the US Air Force. As I’ve started to get re-familiarized recently with the main themes and issues faced by the service, I’ve come to the view that while a lot has changed, a lot hasn’t. One unfortunate constant is the service’s unwillingness or inability to think and plan far enough ahead to protect the experience of its people.
As reported by the Air Force Times, the service has now somehow ended up in a situation where it doesn’t have the money to fund changes of station, re-enlistment bonuses, and other requirements to keep its personnel system running properly.
Re-phrasing: the Air Force has made commitments to its Airmen and families, those Airmen and families have planned their lives accordingly, and now they’re having the rug pulled out from underneath them because of someone else’s ineptitude or misprioritization. It’s inexcusable.
For example: a family planning to move from one base to another in a few months now isn’t sure whether to break its lease, make hotel reservations, sign kids up for school and sports, make vacation plans, place its house on the market for sale, give notice at work, plan a party to say farewell to friends, renew its car insurance or let it lapse, and the list goes on and on. What I noticed in my own career was how much money military families dumped into these situations to absorb uncertainty or mop up after wrong guesses. Money which can’t be claimed back.
Changes of station are just one issue. For others, the fiasco means their career decisions are now uncertain, as bonuses tied to reenlistment are no longer available until the funding issue is resolved. Whether to stay in uniform or change careers is already a massive decision without attaching this uncertainty. To the extent it causes some Airmen to leave, the service will have lost people it needed to keep. Otherwise the bonuses would not have existed in the first place.
According to comments on the Air Force amn/nco/snco Facebook page, this is also preventing some families from retiring, because this requires generating orders to which funding attaches. That funding not being available means retirements are being delayed. This equates to a compulsory extension of service for those impacted. This is akin to conscription. I can argue effectively that it violates Federal law.
This episode is an example of what I refer to as the “Rainy Day Problem.” Organizations have a duty to plan in a way that protects their stakeholders — in this case, employees — from adverse impacts arising from reasonably foreseeable problems.
But the problem with large organizations is that they tend toward an unhealthy fixation on efficiency, especially where the management of funding and expenses is concerned. Over time, this puts pressure on the margins of auxiliary funding available to cover contingencies and bridge gaps in the compensation and experience of employees when a rainy day inevitably arrives. If money can be contributing to the organization’s goals by being put to use proactively, why should it be parked in some backup fund to make sure we can pay people in the event of a funding collapse? Or so goes the thinking.
I speculate that’s at least part of what’s happened here. There should be plenty of money in the Air Force’s humongous budget to bridge gaps that occur because of utterly predictable friction in the budgetary machine. But at various points along the way, decisions have been made to cut things a little more fine. Now the margins are so small that Airmen are at risk every time Congress decides to use military issues as partisan collateral. Which is constantly.
So we find ourselves in an absurd situation because of the way organizations behave over the course of time and growth. The larger and more powerful an organization, the more immune it should be to disruption. But because of the Rainy Day Problem, the larger and more powerful an organization, the less likely it is to respond effectively to a disruption impacting its people.
The answer given by the service for why potentially thousands of families will be thrown into chaos:
The shortfall is driven by higher than projected personnel costs, said Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek. The Air Force is taking the actions to avoid running out of funds, she said.
This is a non-explanation. It raises a lot of questions. Which personnel costs are above projection? By how much? What were we assuming in the projections and what changed to make those assumptions invalid? When did it change? When did we notice? What did we do and who did we inform? Is this impacting the other services or just the Air Force? Why or why not?
If we’re to believe the reporting and its subtext, this issue is arising because the Air Force’s plan to re-characterize funding granted by Congress has been thwarted by some kind of circular firing squad between various politicians and senior members of the Department of Defense concerning who gets snout priority in some feeding trough tied to a new headquarters.
But didn’t the service see this coming? Why did it request and accept without making a ruckus a budget it could foresee was likely to be invalidated by political shenanigans? And maybe most importantly, if Congress is holding thousands of Airmen hostage over some unrelated basing issue, where is the Biden Administration on this? Why does it not appear to be a priority for the Administration to solve?
I’ll answer myself on that last part: because military members are so good at absorbing punishment without whining that they manage to mask the true impact of debacles like this one, meaning there is zero impact to anyone’s political interests as a result of it, and therefore zero accountability.
But make no mistake, this will have a huge impact in the field if it goes on for long. The process of moving people around the Air Force is driven by the mission. The service, at least in theory and most of the time in practice, moves people where commanders need them in order to execute.
The additional impact will be the same as always. A gradual defiling of the trust and confidence of Airmen in their leaders to plan and operate in ways that take proper notice of the human impact. With each wave of erosion, the intrinsic motivations of service are reduced to something closer to a purely interest-driven employment relationship. Discretionary effort subtly reduces. At some point, we’re not as lethal or ready or good as we once were.
So there are both moral and business-related reasons to unscrew this and not screw it up again.
I’ve said it before but apparently it still bears repeating: you will not have superior execution with mediocre support, and the Rainy Day Problem is a prolific progenitor of mass mediocrity. I would advise the service to fix this issue rapidly and to plan better next time.
Credit to Steven Mayne and his page for being on top of this story.
And at the same time, I will close by asking why the Air Force Times, which represents itself as a news outlet, failed to ask any of the questions in this post or follow up with the Air Force on the many claims raised on Steve’s page. The service has shown in the past that it needs the pressure of investigative reporting to remain healthy, so I hope, with all the shameless naivete I can muster, that we will see the paper do better with stories like this in the future.
Otherwise someone else may have to step into the gap. :-)