Re-engineering the United States Marine Corps Special Education Program (SEP)

Abstract

Within the United States Marine Corps, there exist billets (jobs) that require specialized graduate education. Department of Defense agencies submit requests to add billets to their organizational structure. Marine Corps Orders require for every billet added another must be removed elsewhere to balance manpower requirements. Additionally, continuing validation of the billets is required to ensure compliance with Secretary of Defense criteria. Problems in the key function, billet validation, include inflexible, inefficient, and ineffective processes, and nebulous validation criteria. We address these problems by developing a centralized decision support system to be used in a distributed collaborative setting. The objectives of the Special Education Program (SEP) Billet Validation System are to allow SEP billet holders and commands to evaluate and justify existing SEP billets, to assist Military Occupational Specialty Sponsors in identifying manpower reductions, and to validate the graduate education requirement for existing SEP billets. Methods from Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) (specifically Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)) are used to formalize Secretary of Defense requirements and quantify relative ratings of billets. The system employs a Web Browser front-end application to allow the administrative review process to be performed in a parallel manner