Simulation to determine the impacts of life-cycle manning on lieutenants

Abstract

The U.S. Army has proposed a new manning strategy to reduce personnel turbulence and build strong cohesive combat units. Life-cycle manning would synchronize officer assignment with the 3-year life cycle of a Unit of Action (UA). This thesis uses simulation to examine the length of time an officer waits between graduation from the Basic Officer Leadership Course (BOLC) and assignment to a UA. The model is a discrete-event simulation based on a Java library called Simkit. This is a terminating simulation that provides the average delay lieutenants experience before unit assignment, over a 10-year period. This thesis uses robust design to evaluate both the mean performance and the variability of the system. By minimizing a quadratic loss function, optimal settings are determined that trade off some expected delay in order to achieve greater consistency. This analysis reveals that this system behaves like a queueing model in which officer accessions influence the arrival rate and the number of life-cycle units and their fill rates influence the service rates. Reducing officer accessions and the length of the life cycles while increasing the unit strength will keep the system stable and the expected delays smaller with greater consistency.