2.10: The Files Are In The Computer

Header to an issue of the SF Branch Newsletter. May, 2018.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to read that the Army’s Human Resources Command (HRC) sits on top of a massive trove of data. Based in Fort Knox, Kentucky, HRC tracks the location, assignment, promotion, awards, schooling and a thousand other variables for every soldier in the Army. So, it probably makes sense this was where an officer like me was sent for a broadening assignment. Except that’s not how it worked at all. I got sent to HRC because of pure random luck.

Each branch of the army has their own section of assignment officers who manage the careers of their respective MOSs, and instead of having an adjutant corps soldier do it, these slots are filled by soldiers of the same branch they manage.¹ In the SF Officers Assignment branch, they work to ensure there is one officer from each of the five active-duty groups on the team. In the summer of 2017, the current officer from my group was leaving, so I got sent to HRC just because it was our turn.

The army is working to change the way it does assignments, with the goal of using KSBs to determine who should fill which job.² The goal’s a good one, and while the execution needs some work, I’m not ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet. In theory you’d slot people with the right attributes and experience for broadening jobs, maximizing the formation and the soldier’s potential. For a job like HRC Assignment Officer, the KSBs were supposed to look for a soldier with high empathy and excellent people skills.

I’ve been described a lot of ways, but ‘excellent people skills’ has never been one of them. I’ve also taken a battery of different psych tests, and I consistently score very low on empathy.³ I can’t blame all of that on my neurospicyness. I am very direct, which verges on confrontational for many people. I am very loud, some of which is due to hearing loss from my days in Ar Ramadi. And, as has been well established, I am very willing to disrupt existing processes because I don’t think they’re efficient enough.

As I got settled in the new job in SF Branch, I started doing exactly that again. At HRC, I didn’t have to do as much process building as I’d thought. While still subject to the inevitable antiquated Program of Record software challenges, there was a team in the building working on the Toolkit. The Toolkit helped assignment officers manage all the tasks with mentoring and moving hundreds of officers across the planet. It was designed and maintained in house, pulling data from different databases into a single fairly easy to use interface. And, in a call back to my time in Afghanistan working with COIC’s google earth forum, I could always walk down the hallway, ask for some changes, and see them rolled out just a few weeks later. I really liked the Toolkit team.

I still found a few places to make updates. First stop was migrating the PowerPoint career timeline tool. This was the same one I’d used when I was a captain and was deciding whether to stay in or get out. I swapped PowerPoint for an Excel version that would adjust automatically based off the officer’s year group, with pre-sized color blocks that fit the length of assignment to help soldiers try out ideas, sort of a Lego ‘build your own career’.

HRC was also where I met ORSAs for the first time, a job I did not know even existed until one of them was showing me how to put slicers into an Excel Spreadsheet.⁴ HRC sits on hard drives filled with data, so it makes sense that ORSAs would gravitate there. It wasn’t uncommon to wander into their cubicles and find them crunching on an RFI from the Chief of Staff of the Army.⁵ The entire team of ORSAs were exceptionally selfless and always willing to sacrifice their time to help coach me through Excel tricks. They were also great at helping me figure out how to tackle complicated problems.

One of the first challenges SF branch needed help with was a shortage of SF captains. SF selects candidates off of high standards, not off of a quota. However, we do need a certain number of incoming captains each year if we are going to be able to fill all the detachments with commanders. While we don’t change the standards, we do track how we’re doing at filling those jobs. Exactly how many we needed turned out to be a more contentious argument than I’d expected.

This is mostly because what seems simple, the number slots for captains that need to be filled each year, gets messy in execution. Not all the captains graduate at the same time in the year and they don’t all go directly to a team.⁶ They don’t all come off a team at the same time. Some get fired, some get promoted early, and some die.⁷ So while SF Captains move through the army as a single cohort year group, tracking the manning quickly gets complicated.

Our adversary was the SF Proponent office, the ostensible head of our branch charged with ‘execution of training, leader development, education, and personnel responsibilities for their designated branch’. SF Proponent, which was at in North Carolina at SWC, was arguing for 125 a year as the target, while we were arguing for a higher target of 155.⁸ Our argument was based off the number of KD SF jobs in the Army (300). Since KD was two years long, we argued you needed 1/2 that each year, with 5 extras to cushion unanticipated losses. I have no idea what Proponent based their 125 number off of. They never shared their math with us.

From our seat at HRC, we could see three year groups had under produced, and we were going to struggle going forward without a change. This is because a hole in year group 2009 can’t be filled by year group 2013.⁹ You have to let the bubble in the line work itself out.

As they pushed back on our argument for a higher target, SF Proponent offered up a slew of arguments, one of which was if we took in more captains then we’d need to accept candidates with lower panel scores. Since we already took every captain above the existing floor score, this was finally some real math, and I could not argue with it.

But what were the panel scores? SF ran a panel for captains that applied to try out, meeting after the results of the captains’ promotion board were published. The SF Panel decided which captains would get an invite to SFAS.¹⁰

But it had a very small data set to consider. There was little more than one or two OERs and their ORB in an officer’s packet.¹¹ I’m not mad at the panel members. They were doing the best they could with a weak dataset. But bias reigned supreme, with soldiers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne scoring higher than those from 2nd or 4th Infantry, even though most officers have almost no say in where their first assignment will be.

I explained my challenge to my buddies in the ORSA section. I couldn’t really do much analysis on the officers who weren’t selected, so they suggested I compare the MOP scores of current SF officers to the old panel scores and see how good the panel was doing at picking winners.¹² I thought it’d be hard to find the old panel scores, but I was wrong. They were right there in the SF Branch share drive, just waiting to be excavated. Every score for every officer going back to 2002. Running a comparison took a few minutes and the results were stark.

We looked at two year groups: the 2002 class who were about to promote to lieutenant colonel, and the 2008 class who were about to promote to major. In the 2002 year group, the panel had given their top scores to several officers who turned out to be bottom performers in their year group. Meanwhile, one officer, who’d barely made the minimum panel score went on to promote BZ three times.¹³ For 2008 it was even worse with half of the top ten officers scoring low-to-minimum panel scores.

Excerpt from ‘HRC SF Branch Newsletter, Vol. 9 (MAY 2018)’

The results left us wondering, how many Tom Brady’s had we been missing out on over the years? Instead of having a panel pre-judge who should attend SFAS, SF Branch advocated, ‘Let selection select’. At selection, officers would go through an IQ test, multiple psych tests, as well as a myriad of physical and mental challenges to tease out who the soldier is at their core. This was actually how NCOs attend SFAS, which gave us the added benefit of getting officers to selection faster than waiting on the panel.¹⁴

When SF Proponent couldn’t produce any data to refute ours, the SF Panel was eliminated. ‘Let Selection select’ was an early win for me at HRC, and a chance to show that, while I still lacked ‘excellent people skills’, I had the potential to make an impact. As I started poking around the Toolkit and hard drives chock full of decades of data, I wondered what other answers were just lying around waiting for someone curious enough to look.

1. Adjutant Corps (AG) is the Human Resources branch of the US Army.

2. Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviors. The army hasn’t quite been able to pivot to a KSB assignment approach, in part because the system requires amassing and updating a ton of data about the soldiers, and in part because it’s up against a lot of leaders who don’t see any reason to change the current system.

3. Starting in SFAS and throughout your time in Special Operations, SOF soldiers are given a myriad of psych, education, IQ, and other personality tests. Often multiple times. When I say I lack people skills, I come bearing data.

4. Operations Research and Systems Analysis. ORSAs are the data scientists of the army, charged with advising commanders in complex problems and critical decisions.

5. Request for Information. It’s just a question, but the army loves its initialisms.

6. I spent 10 months as a company XO before getting my detachment.

7. As one of my first SF NCO mentors was fond of saying, ‘We don’t bake cookies for a living’.

8. The US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS) is where all Army SF is trained. It also has the worst acronym in the Army, which is why we call is SWC for short.

9. Plenty of senior leaders ignored us on this and tried. It didn’t work, and instead resulted in a glut of captains in later year group.

10. Special Forces Assessment and Selection. The 24-day course candidates attend that tests their ability to train to become a Special Forces soldier - a Green Beret.

11. Officer Record Brief, a sort of one page resume for the Army, now replaced by a Soldier Talent Profile.

12. Measure of Performance, it’s a calculated number based off an officer’s OERs and file strength.

13. Below-the-Zone, or promoting a year early.

14. Footnote: As a paneled officer, I applied for SF in the fall of 2005 but did not attend SFAS until January of 2007. Most NCOs can expect to be at SFAS within less than 9 weeks of dropping their packet.