"Force Development"
Lieutenant General Roger A. Brady
Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel, HQ/USAF
Air & Space Conference 2004—Washington, DC
September 14, 2004
General Brady: First, I want to thank the Air Force Association for what I think is a tremendous format they have this year and for providing opportunities like this for some of us to talk to the force and to our civilian partners regarding what we're doing in our Air Force. I really am thankful for this opportunity.
I'm going to talk about force development which you've heard a lot about in the last two years, and then I'll talk just briefly about service delivery, which is how we are changing over time the way we deliver personnel services to you, in a better way and with fewer resources. Then we'll talk about force shaping, which is an interesting little challenge that we have.
Force development is getting people ready to be Air Force leaders. Everybody. Not the select few, everybody—enlisted, officer, civilian, active duty, Guard, Reserve. And as we go through our careers, it's probably instructive to put kind of a tactical, operational and strategic focus on it to show how we are going to do it.
The tactical focus. Obviously, when you're new in the force you're learning your business at ground level. You're becoming experts in whatever your specialty is. We need to make sure that we're developing you right at that level.
As you become more of a supervisor, leadership becomes more important and you become a team builder. We need to make sure that you have the right assignments, the right experience, and the right education to do that.
Strategically, at some point many of you will be in situations where you provide leadership for the whole Air Force. In the enlisted world, an example of that would be a career field manager. We have a bunch of career field managers that I have the pleasure of working with occasionally over in the building. We also have them at MAJCOMs, people managing our different AFSCs and trying to keep them healthy. That's a challenge as well.
What we want is to have leaders who have a little broader perspective. We believe that the Air Force has always done a pretty good job of developing leaders. You look back on our history and you could argue that we've done a pretty good job, but a lot of the leaders that we've developed; it's been a little bit catch as catch can. There hasn't always been a great plan for how we get individuals to where they are and provide them the right preparation. And despite the fact that we've always had good leaders, it begs the question when you see how we do it, as to who we left behind or who we did not develop or who did not have the right kinds of opportunities. So our effort is to first of all give people a wider perspective, develop as many people as we possibly can, so that when we select leaders, we have a larger pool of people to select from. Not only that, but everybody does the best job, has the opportunity to develop to the highest level they can at whatever level they aspire to.
The discussion of force development in this context began I think in about 1997 with General Ryan. And he had a circumstance which AFA Executive Director Don Peterson can probably remember where he, as I recall, was trying to hire a three star to do something. As it turned out, there was like one guy in the whole Air Force that fit the bill. It occurred to him at that time, “you know, I've got 282 general officers here. I ought to have a little more selectivity in this.”
So, as he started to study the general officer corps, he saw that the generals were not as general as they ought to be. In fact, they were kind of specific. But that name doesn't come tripping off the tongue. You can't call them “specifics.” [Laughter] He said we really ought to see if we can develop a second expertise in people as they go along so that you don't end up with somebody like Peterson and Brady that have to be the DP.
So that's what we mean by giving people a wider perspective. And we want to do it in a systemic and deliberate way. We want to develop both the necessary skills and the enduring competencies as we go along—‘Enduring competencies’ being ‘leadership’ in shorthand. And we want to develop interchangeable leaders and this is interchangeable in two ways. Interchangeable across specialties and also across the components of the force. In other words, we need to be able to ask ourselves as we go through time, we've got a requirement here, is an NCO appropriate? Does it really require an officer? Can an NCO do this? Does it really require a military person? Why can't a civilian do this? Does it really have to be active duty? Couldn't another member of the Total Force do this? You're starting to see some interchangeability in our force that in the past you've never seen. It's more visible to you probably among civilians. You're starting to see senior civilians in positions where you only saw general officers in the past.
We now have, for example, a civilian FM, Barb Westgate, at AFMC. I think the next FM, money person, is a civilian lady, Pat Zee, also at AFMC. Of course, my deputy, Roger Blanchard, has been a civilian for some time. These deputies, forever and ever when I was growing up in the Air Force, were military positions. So we are consciously looking at the places where we can be more interchangeable.
The deputy LG at both Air Combat Command and Air Mobility Command now are people that are civilians. Typically out of depots. Then they go from being with the warfighter back to being a CD, a deputy. A depot guy that understands what the warfighter wants. What a concept! It's working great. That's what we want to do.
Let me tell you how force development works in a structural sense in the Air Force, and I'll tell you up front we're a lot further along. We started with officers, we're a lot further along with officer force development and the construct than we are with enlisted, civilian, Guard and Reserve. I'll give you an update on where we are.
We're in our second year of officer force development and it starts up here with some great minds which include the Air Force Council (which is basically the two digits on the Air Staff) and a group of folks fondly referred to as the “vice squad,” which is all of the vice commanders of the MAJCOMs. So those two groups of people come together and we meet and think about big stuff like, for example, what does Intermediate Development Education (IDE)—formerly known as Intermediate Service School—what kinds of things should you get credit for doing? We discuss that. Should WIC guys get credit for IDE? Should WIC instructors get credit for IDE? Should test pilots get credit for IDE? Those kinds of questions. Are there special programs? In other words, we're looking at a career.
You've only got so many years and we're looking at whether there are other opportunities, other things that we're already doing that you can get at least partial credit for, so that we don't take a huge number of people out of the force. If you start looking at force development, and we're going to develop more people than we ever have, that's a good news/bad news story. The good news is you're making a lot of people smarter. The bad news is you have an increased percentage of your people out of the fight at any one time. So how much of that can you stand?
So we're looking at, what can you double bang? Are there some things that people are doing that ought to give them partial credit and then we can give them joint PME or whatever in a six-week course. You put that together, you tie a bow on it and you say, “okay, you are now IDE.” But those are the kinds of decisions we discuss at Force Development Council.
The functional authorities are guys like me for manpower and personnel, for example; guys like Lieutenant General Ron Keys for the operators. Everybody's got a functional daddy. Then you have a functional manager here and a functional manager is someone like Major General John Spiegel. John Spiegel is DPP, the personnel policy guru for the Air Force. He and Bear Ard take care of the manpower bubbas on that developmental team. Functional manager is really also part of the developmental team, head of the developmental team.
Now the developmental teams—there are 26 or 27 developmental teams. You've got the loggies, your basic acquisition guys, personnelists, operators, etc. These teams meet about three to four times a year down at the Personnel Center and they are supported by an organization in AFPC that is, in the DPA Assignments Branch, and they also have a considerable analytical capability. They're kind of like board support for promotion boards, but they support the developmental team as they look at what to do with you folks next. Whether it's a vector check in the fall and the spring, an IDE discussion, an education discussion in the summer, they help to decide what we're going to do with you next and what's the best thing for you to do.
The developmental team then provides that recommendation which is based on input from you, your supervisor, your senior rater, and sends it over to the infamous iron majors of Air Force Personnel Center that we all know and love. And they make assignments. And there's a grade card, trust me, of what the consistency is between what the developmental team recommends and what the assignment team does. There's also a grade card to compare what the individual supervisor says and what the developmental team recommends.
Now this is where you come in, you individuals being looked at and you supervisors. You've got to do a good job for them to do a good job. If you send your list of people in and say, “They’re all wonderful. Send them all to National War College, they're all heroes,” guess what? These people are going to make the decision for you. You've given away your vote.
If the developmental team doesn't do a good job, the iron majors are going to put a round peg in a round hole. Okay? So it's really important that individuals communicate what they want to do; that supervisors give realistic, candid feedback to people about what their potential is and what they need to do and what's reasonable, and then supervisors need to communicate that to the development teams. The developmental team is the key cog in this whole force development construct.
We've got doctrine. We're writing an AFI in CONOPS that has been published. The second revision, as a matter of fact, is underway. Developmental teams have met about three or four times. We're working officer development plans and those continue to be refined. We've hosted two career field manager conferences and we've had two Force Development Council meetings. I'm scheduled to have another one. I'm kind of the engine running gopher for the Force Development Council. We're going to meet again in October.
We're doing the same thing with the enlisted corps. Chief Murray is all over this. There obviously are some differences. They've looked at a voluntary education review. We're about to get the results of that. A lot of lessons learned from OEF/OIF on how we use the enlisted force. There is a chief master sergeant utilization review going on and they're developing an Air Staff course. We don't do well sometimes in preparing our enlisted when they come in and show them where they fit in in the Air Staff and get them going. We're going to try to work that a little better. Quite frankly, we don't do a tremendous job with officers, either.
Regarding the chief master sergeant utilization review, what we're looking at is we have moved the management of chief master sergeants into the general officer business and the colonels business. They are senior leaders. We're going to have a number of chief master sergeants who are kind of stovepipe people, and I don't mean that in a negative sense. I just mean there are some career fields where you really need from top to bottom a high degree of technical expertise that you maintain. But we have a lot of chief master sergeants. When you get that senior and you're that good, and we have a great enlisted system, I believe, we ought to be able to send you just about anywhere, just like we send colonels just about anywhere.
So we're doing that. We're going to use the very considerable leadership skills of the chief master sergeants in areas outside their functional specialty.
For civilians, it’s the same thing. We've got the equivalent of military force development. We're looking, as I said, at how to develop people. We need to start down, rather than wait until we get to the SES’s and say, “Gee, can we find one?” We need to look at our 12s and 13s and 14s and say, “Okay, who wants to really play in this game? Who wants to develop themselves? Who's willing to get some extra education? Who's willing to move out of their stovepipe? Who's willing to move, period?” We're not going to move civilians as often as we do general officers because I think that kind of defeats the purpose of having civilians. You need a little bit more continuity and that's part of what civilians bring you. But civilians are not going to remain 27 years in one place anymore if they are people who aspire to the leadership track. The really good ones want to move, are willing to move—nobody wants to move, let's face it—but they're willing to move to have an opportunity to contribute more, to do different things, and this is pretty exciting stuff I think.
There are challenges with the Guard and Reserve because they're a little bit different. Their availability is different. But at the same time, I came from Air Mobility Command before I came here. We used the Guard and Reserve in AMC every single day. They fly a significant part of our sorties every day. They provide a significant part of the leadership. They are great guys and gals, but we have traditionally not always given them leadership development opportunities. So we need to work through how we do that.
Typically, in the Guard and Reserve, who do you send to PME? Who can afford to take a year off? That's probably not the right selection process. So we need to work and we are working with the Guard and Reserve leadership to figure out how do we work PME? How do we adjust PME also to make it a little more Guard and Reserve friendly, and then how do we manage people once we've selected them for these development opportunities? How do we take care of them?
The same sort of thing for Reserves. We're working really hard on how we do education and assignments, and that's a big deal. How do you do development when almost nobody's a part-timer any more, but you don't have quite the access to these people that you do the active duty? How do we work this in a way that makes sense?
I can recall when we put together the leadership teams that went to OEF and OIF. We had a real mixed bag. We would have a reservist commanding an all-active unit. We would have an active guy or gal commanding a mixed bag of Guard units. We are totally and certainly in the mobility world, and I think to some degree in the CAF, although I can't speak to that. Totally interchangeable. If you're going to do that you've got to make sure the people are ready to do it.
The functional communities have direct input on who is selected for assignments to develop for the first time. I've worked a lot with General Billy Bowles, the godfather of personnel, now that General Dixon's gone. But I've worked a lot with General Bowles and he has been incredibly supportive of what we're doing which has been very important to us.
Force development is not new in that we used to have teams at the center long ago that did this. However, what we're doing now—and every generation tries to improve, just like the generation that comes behind me will—is looking at getting this force involved and the leadership involved in the personnel system. The developmental teams, there are only a couple of “personnel pukes”—that's a term of art. [Laughter] There are only a couple of personnel guys on these developmental teams. These are commanders. If you don't like it, it's your own fault. This is your system. The personnel system belongs to commanders and supervisors of the United States Air Force. We need to send the first team to the developmental teams. You're making big decisions about how to develop our people. This is important stuff.
Service is delivered quickly. There is a personnelist for every 30 people in the Air Force. That's a lot. More than 11,000 personnelists. You tell that to an industry guy and they'll go, “jiminy Christmas, you've got to be kidding me.” The industry standard is more like one to 250.
I continue to tell my staff every day, we are a lot more than HR. We can't go to Boeing and offer them more money to get a lieutenant colonel. We grow lieutenant colonels and we grow chief master sergeants. So we do a lot more than HR, but there are some parallels that we need to learn from.
The human resources world outside the military is much more efficient than we are in terms of doing just purely transactional things. There are lots of things that we do for people that they've got to drive over to the MPF, find a parking space, go to the BX and commissary on the way, to spend five minutes with Airman Schwartz getting something done. Whereas they ought to be able to log onto their computer and do it, or they ought to be able to call a call center to take care of it. About 90% or more of what we do does not really require face-to-face interaction. We need to sort that out with a smaller footprint and give some payback to the warfighter as well.
These are some of the things that we've started looking at and we have brought both personnelists and commanders and people from outside the personnel world into our labs in San Antonio to look at these processes, see how we do them now, and ask our customers, can we do this differently? Are you willing to do this self service? Do you think it would be okay to just do it by calling somebody on the phone? Or do you no kidding have to be face to face? There are some things that require human interaction. There are a lot of things we can do on the web.
I've told my folks there's some risk involved in this. We cannot afford for anybody to call and get a voice message that says, “your call is very important to us.” [Laughter]
Recently, my home computer died. I'm a political science major from Oklahoma. I don't do computers. I do computers in self defense. So I'm trying to get my computer to work. I started about a month ago. I have not talked to a human being yet because I can't find one on the phone. That's a flunk. Okay? When I do talk to one I'm a really nasty individual. [Laughter]
We can't do that. If old Brady gets on the computer trying to do something and he gets frustrated and wants to bail out and talk to a human being, he's got to be able to do that. So we've got to do this in a way that takes care of our force.
There's a widespread rumor that I'm now the Kevorkian of personnel. I'm going to kill the personnel career field. Personnelists are not going to have anything to do. I don't think that's true. In fact, I'm quite sure that the opposite is true. The personnel career field is going to be smaller and needs to be. However, the personnel people that remain in the career field, and frankly, at this moment I don't know what size that is, but they are going to have more valued work to do. I think that personnelists are going to be the individuals that the commander is not going to go to war without. You're going to be the engine-running expert on everything in the squadron. You're not going to be the Det Corps 6 expert necessarily like you are now, but you're going to be an expert in force development, manpower, managing the people resource of our business, and I think this is exciting stuff.
MAJCOM DPs are probably going to be smaller. That's been a little bit of an emotional event with some of them, but most of what MAJCOM DPs do is grade the homework of Air Force Personnel Center. There's a lot of things that are done at MAJCOM level in the personnel business that the center could easily do, and we can still meet the customer's demands. We learned that in the supply business.
I can remember telling a bunch of wing commanders in Europe that we were taking their [micappers] away from them and putting them at a regional center. They just killed me. You would have thought it was their favorite child. That was five years ago. Now you can't find a wing commander that knows what a [micapper] is. They're still working his issue, they're just at the regional center. It doesn't matter where the job gets done just as long as it gets done.
The commanders in the main, we're not messing with this. I've gone around doing missionary work with all the four stars on this. They start out by saying, "I don't trust you Brady." They get over that emotional moment. This is the stuff they care about. They care about dealing with senior officer matters, they care about things that allow them to take care of their people and nobody ever thought about trying to take that away from them.
Back in January we said there's a tendency when people deploy forward, if they want to get something done in the personnel business they think they've got to call their home drone because they know Sally back at the MPF. You don't need to do that any more. AFPC is doing PERSCO support. You don't have to call home. Call the center. They'll take care of you.
We're also moving more and more things to the web. There are more and more things that you need to do and you can do on the web, and I've continued to tell the MPFs that doesn't mean when somebody comes in and says, “I want to do my emergency data update,” that you put your hands on your hips and say, "We don't do that here anymore." You say, "Hey, let me show you how to do that on your computer." You walk them over there and say, “let me show you how you can do this and you don't have to do the BX, commissary, MPF tour.” Okay? [Laughter]
In regard to force shaping, we have a small problem. [Laughter] We are authorized 359,700 people. Who's counting? The Secretary is. We currently have 379,000 people. When I came on board last year, we were somewhere between 13,000 and 16,000 people over. We have got to get back down to 359,700 next year about this time or there will be another face briefing you.
I can tell you we went up to about 381; 2,200 people net left the Air Force by the end of August. We had 379. We're now back down to only 20,000 over. We think we'll be down another 1,200 or so at the end of September. We're going to go back down to 359,700.
How did we get there? “Brady, you've only been there a few months. How did you screw it up this fast?” [Laughter] I am cleaning up General Peterson's mess. [Laughter]
In 1999, we missed our goal in recruiting for the first time in our history. When something like that happens in Washington, D.C. we go berserk. Huge political pressure, both in the building and from across the river. So we went out there and said, “bring us your tired, your hungry, your drug-free.” You can come in the Air Force. [Laughter] And we brought great Americans, don't get me wrong. We brought great Americans into our force in huge numbers. We met our goals. They were not the right skill sets in a lot of cases. Now that combined with 9/11, a huge surge in patriotism. A lot of people who planned to leave were saying, “I can't leave in the middle of a fight.” We had people I know in AMC who were on terminal leave and came back and said, “can I come back? I want to be part of this.”
So people are saying, “I'm not leaving.” Even though they'd planned to get on with their life doing other things.
We did stop loss. Stop loss is great for retention—just a tip for you. [Laughter] We did two sessions of stop loss. When you do that, you kind of lose visibility on what the force wants to do because you've got this captive audience.
You also have the economy in the tank, unlike in the '90s we were all getting rich at a rapid rate. Now the economy is still uncertain at best and all this adds up to people are not going home. We bring in about 37,000 people to our Air Force every year and it would be real nice if about 37,000 went home every year. That didn't happen. And when we removed stop loss we thought everybody would run for the gates, and it didn't happen. They stayed.
Our target for first term reenlistments is 55%. Our first term reenlistment has been about 70% for a couple of years now. That has big perturbations on your force. So we got to be huge.
Who cares? Well, we care and the Congress cares. It costs you anywhere between $1 billion to $1.5 billion to have an extra 10,000 people. So it costs us somewhere between $2 to $3 billion to pay for an extra 20,000 people. You can do a lot of training and equipping with $3 billion.
So we put together a plan called Force Shaping Phase 1 to see if we could, as they say, spook the herd. [Laughter] It's a personnel term. It didn't work.
We made some offers, because we didn't know how many people would take it. We made a few fairly milk toast offers, and about 2,500 people took it. Then we decided we needed to open the aperture here, so we did. We increased the window of people that would be eligible. We started looking at career job reservations. Quite frankly, we got lazy on career job reservations. CJR is something you've got to do every year if you're going to manage the force. Career job reservation. You compete for an assignment in your career field at reenlistment time. We've got to do this. We quit doing it.
So we're doing career job reservation where, if you're in an overage career field, you can either cross-train to something where we need you more, you can go to the Guard, you can go to the Reserve, you can go to the Army, and if all those options aren't attractive to you, you'll go home.
We're making it real easy for people to get out. The FY '04 National Defense Authorization Act gave the Secretaries of the services the authority to let colonels and lieutenant colonels retire at two years in grade vice three. But it's limited by law to only two percent of the force, so that's only a few hundred people, so there's not a lot of joy there. But there's a long, unruly line. We've got more people here signed up than we can give it to, I think, in some areas. Of course not everybody will get to do this, but we're pretty big picture on this.
We also looked at how you cut accessions. Well, cutting accessions is the heroin of the personnel business. You can get hooked on that. [Laughter] It works like a charm. But it also does terrible things to you. So we looked at it. We're dealing with a bathtub now in the kind of six to ten year group folks and we didn't want to revisit that. That's working its way through the force, but we didn't want to revisit that.
We didn't want to break faith with our people and throw a bunch of people out, which we have the authority to do, but that does terrible things for you. It's the wrong thing to do and has a long-term impact on you.
We said, “well, let's just see what we can do for one year. We don't want a bathtub, let's see if we can deal with a post hole.” So for one year we are reducing our accessions by 11,000. That's about a third. When we saw the impact of what we were doing, or the fact that we weren't getting big results, we pretty much shut down recruiting in May. By May, you're through. You're pretty much done. There's not much you can do the rest of the fiscal year. But we ended up reducing the '04 accessions by about 2,500. Add that to 11,000 we're not bringing in, so you've got 13,000 to 14,000 people that we're reducing in the combination of '04 and '05 for accessions.
The bottom line is we've got about 7,800 people signed up. These people are signed up. They are not off the books. There's a difference. People can sign up, but then they go off the books for several months. It tells you what we're doing with Palace Chase. This is all Phase 2, by the way. Phase 1, you'll recall, is the 2,500 and change. Palace Chase applications, additional duty service commitment waivers, DOS rollback, CJRs, which we are—this is ongoing. We've limited offer continuation which means two-time passovers to major are going away. We're separating training washouts if they cannot qualify for a career field that we need them in. We're going to allow some people who want to go direct to the ARC or direct to the Army out of ROTC. Reduce time in grade, as I said. Blue to green. Not a huge number of takers here. [Laughter] And the accessions reductions that we talked about.
Force shaping is more than drawdown. Force shaping is getting your AFSCs like they need to be. And so we've discussed this with the big guys at Corona a couple of times and we're starting to develop the sustainment models for each career.
We've gone through life kind of saying—and it's a good bumper sticker for the Congress because it's an easy thing for everyone to understand—the right numbers are 55% retention, first term; 75, second term; 95, career. But when you think about it, does that makes sense? It might make sense in the aggregate, but there are careers that that doesn't make sense. I'm not convinced you need to keep 55% of the cops, for example. We need to look at every career field and build a sustainment model for each career field because they all have some different requirements. That's what we're doing, and the functional authority with the Force Development Council presents findings. We've done that once in July.
I had the first meeting in August. I'm meeting monthly with all the career field managers and we're looking at a handful of these to say, “okay, what do we need to do with these career fields?”
Our career field managers are wonderful people. Alone, unarmed, unafraid, unsupervised. Now they do a tremendous job, don't get me wrong. Smart people. Some of them are some of you folks in here. But they're looking at their career field. We need to look at it also in the aggregate and we need to learn from each other. So I'm just trying to provide a forum where career field managers can see what Sally has already figured out that Joe hasn't. Figure out how to manage our career fields. I mean things as simple as I found out recently that the civil engineers had cut a deal with somebody to get security clearances done faster. That's probably worthwhile information for everybody. So we need to learn from each other.
We've also learned, like I said, the 55/74/95 doesn't necessarily make sense. It tells you something important. It tells you the intention of individuals, it tells you a little about the morale of the force, it tells you the intention of individuals at that four-year point, or maybe six-year point, whether or not they're going to stay in. But did you realize that from the day people walk in Lackland until when they make this decision, do you know that 25% of our people do not get to first term? They fall out for one reason or another—medical, behavioral, whatever. Did you realize that? So the retention figure doesn't tell you all the things you need to know to measure a force.
So we're looking at what do you need to know? You do need to look at current manning, but does it help you to be 110% manned in air traffic controllers if half of them are three levels? It doesn't help you at all. They can't direct traffic. So you've got to be a little more sophisticated than that. You've got to look at the stress factor. What's the rotation factor on them? What is the AEF demand versus the supply? What is the production of the schoolhouse? We worked this daily with AETC. How many did they program to graduate? How many did they actually graduate? What's our average career length? We're developing this metric of average career length which is starting to be very helpful to us. It's different for every career field and it needs to be different for every career field. We need to establish tolerances.
Take, for example, some of our Ops Intel folks here. These are some of our intensive care AFSCs. These are hurting puppies.
Let's look at pararescue. They are hurting across the board. Their overall manning, 65%; their three-level manning is 57%; 59% five levels; 70% seven levels. Stress factor, 1.98. We'd like to get it down to about 1.2. By the way, 1.0 is pre-9/11. It doesn't mean you're kicking back in a rocking chair, but you're better off than we've been. 1.98, high stress. AEF demand versus supply or they're green. What does that mean? All that means is for this AEF they are currently in, we didn't have to go into future buckets to help to get there. That's all that means.
The problem with pararescue is production. It's several schools, long schools. We don't own the schools. Those are the kinds of things that we have to work ourselves through. Are we retaining them? Yeah. We're retaining them pretty well, 93%. We're just beginning. This is kind of embryonic. We need to get even more sophisticated than this. We need to look at every career field and say how deployable is this career field? How many Code Cs do we have in this career field? What do we need to do about that? We need to address a lot of those issues across the force.
Okay, I'm through. [Laughter] What you got?
Q&A Session:
Q: How is the Force Development Council organized?
General Brady: Regarding the Force Development Council, let me give you an example. In the rated world, for example, because the rated world is pretty big, we have panels. Major General Marney Peterson is the career field manager, but for example the math guy, air mobility forces guy, is Mark Volchip. He's the AMC/DO. He and Michelle Johnson, the A1 at Air Mobility Command and some of their wing commanders sit together on the Force Development Council. That's a typical mix.
Q: Yesterday Secretary Roche talked about advanced education for both officers and enlisted. However, there seems to be some resistance to the concept. How will advanced academic degrees factor into decisions made by promotion boards?
General Brady: Okay, advanced academic degrees. Do I need to go get a master's degree? No, but you guys don't believe me, right? What will it take for you to believe me? The promotion board has got to quit seeing that and your senior rater's got to quit looking at it.
I sent a note to the boss this morning, because we discussed this at Corona in front of the great minds, the most spirited discussion I've ever seen at a Corona. And the Chief believes you don't need to get a master's degree. The Secretary believes you don't need to get a master's degree. If you need one, we'll get you one. But promotion boards, everybody walks on water, right, so the promotion board looks to see if you've got a master's degree or not. We need to take that crutch away from the promotion board. I think we're going to do that. We've already done it to major. I think we're going to do it soon all the way up through colonel. The only master's degrees that will be shown will be the ones that we send you for and the only reason they'll be shown is because you get a training report.
I know you guys have gone out there to spend a bajillion dollars to go do this, so we're going to let you continue to do that, and if we institute this which I personally think we will, it will be for the '07 boards. The boards that meet in '07, I believe, unless I get slam dunked here in the next week or so, will not show your self-procured master's degrees. Also your MLOs will not see it and we're going to have some really straightforward, tersely worded notes to the senior rater that says, “Hey, it's in the books now, but they're not reading it.” This is almost an integrity issue. When you're filling out OPRs and you're filling out PRFs, you don't go scurrying around and find out if people are working on their master's degree. That's a foul. Okay?