How Should the Army Run? Archives - War Room - U.S. Army War College

Talent management is simple. All that is necessary is to match the many people in any particular rank and specialty who are moving at a given time to the right job that matches talent, enables professional growth, meets personal and family needs, and maximizes unit effectiveness and efficiency. Maybe it is not so simple after all. Sarah Kaiser and Jacy Park join host Lou Yuengert to discuss the results of their research on talent management in the Army and larger Department of Defense (DoD). Sarah researched the DoD Career Intermission Program (CIP), of which she is also a participant. Jacy examined the Army's current talent management efforts. They share their findings with Lou and highlight the successes and shortcomings of both efforts with recommendations for improvement. Listen in to their conversation in the next installment of our How Should the Army Run (HSTAR) series.

What happens when you get three experienced soldiers together to discuss something they've worked on for much of their careers? Well, the first thing that happens is that they "go secure" and start speaking in acronyms. More importantly, you get an enthusiastic conversation about transforming the Army to support soldiers now and well into the future. LTG Ross Coffman is in the virtual studio with hosts Lou Yuengert and Bob Bradford, and as the Deputy Commanding General of Futures Command, he's got a front-row seat to some of the Army's biggest innovation efforts across the force.

When faced with a challenge, a soldier will always come up with some sort of solution to make the system, process or piece of equipment work. It may not be an elegant solution or a good use of time, but they will find a way to make it work. Lori Mongold and Andrew St. Laurent are doing everything in their power to make sure soldiers don't have to find workarounds to disconnected systems, at least in the force management world. They are the chief and deputy chief of the office in the Army staff charged with fixing how the service creates and manages units. Their solution revises processes and replaces fifteen legacy systems with one new information technology system, the Global Force Information Management Operational Environment. They join host Bob Bradford in the studio to explain the bureaucratic journey required to move the global force management process from the industrial to the cognitive era.

Plan, Program, Budget and Execute - repeat. It's the strategic planning process for allocating resources in the Department of Defense that was first initiated in the early 1960s. The brainchild of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, it was originally the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting, or PPBS. Over the years the "System" was dropped and replaced with "Execution" yielding the current iteration, PPBE. A Better Peace is pleased to welcome retired Army Major General John Ferrari, to better understand the workings and inherent tensions of the PPBE process. The former Director of Program Analysis and Evaluation (2014-2019), MG Ferrari shares his extensive insider perspective on the incredibly complex process that was created out of a need to wrangle a growing defense institution and the associated budgets. He joins Bob Bradford and Tom Galvin to present a primer and much more on PPBE. They discuss where it succeeds, where it doesn't and some of the necessary characteristics of relationships and leadership that need to be understood and refined to keep the process moving forward effectively.

Lou Yuengert and Tom Galvin are back in the studio for another episode of "How Should the Army Run?" This episode focuses on Lou's recent service on the Army's Talent Management Task Force. The Army has done relatively well at placing its top performers in appropriate leadership positions, but in an organization of high performers are the other 90% of the personnel being placed where they are best suited while still meeting the needs of the service? Lou shares his experience as the Army struggles to move from an industrial age strength management system to a system that puts the right people in the right jobs routinely throughout their career. It's a big task and there is a lot of information that has to be measured, managed and available to make it work.

Tom Galvin is back in the studio for another episode of "How Should the Army Run?" He's joined today by Doug "Muddy" Waters to talk about how the Army (and the rest of DoD) gets its funding. In this stage-setting episode Tom and Muddy discuss Congressional processes like appropriations and authorizations, continuing resolutions, the "color of money", and you'll hear familiar terms like POM, OCO, O&M and RDT&E. It's a great primer on how the basics of the budget process work and a great starting point to inform change.

In 1997, the U.S. Army War College produced the first edition of How the Army Runs (HTAR), a reference handbook that documented and explained the processes and organization of the U.S. Army. Published every two years, the document has evolved along with the organization it seeks to capture in writing. As the editor of the last five editions of HTAR, Lou Yuengert was once asked by a former War College commandant, "Have you ever thought about writing a book about how the Army should run?" A Better Peace welcomes Lou to the studio to kick off a new series to examine whether the organization and operation of the Army is really the best way to conduct business in the joint world. He sits down with War Room Senior Editor Tom Galvin to consider what works and what doesn't and why. The two have an excellent conversation setting the stage for future episodes that hope to not just critique, but to offer innovative suggestions and even praise those elements that work well.