Knowledge transfer and succession planning are challenges for all organizations, but are particularly acute challenges within the federal government with its quadrennial election cycle. The smooth transfer of knowledge is made even more difficult in an environment of workforce reduction. Often these gaps are merely inconvenient or annoying, but sometimes they have life or death consequences – no greater example of which can be found than the nation’s aging arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, wrote in the current issue of an internal publication, Joint Force Quarterly, that “many, if not most, of the individuals who worked [on nuclear deterrence] in the 1970s and 1980s – the real experts at this discipline – are not doing it anymore. And we have not even tried to find their replacements.”
Downsizing is probably the cause. Believe it or not, the federal government has reduced its workforce by almost 325,000 full-time equivalent employees since 1993, with many of these reductions coming from the Department of Defense.
Reducing the size of government is not a bad thing, but the manner in which it is done can have critical effects. Rather than a strategy of targeted reductions aligned with changing agency missions, most downsizing in the last 15 years was accomplished through across-the-board staff reductions and hiring freezes. Extended hiring freezes reduced the pool of people within an organization with new knowledge, energy, and ideas – the reservoir of future organization leaders and managers.
A consequence of this is that the average age of the federal workforce has risen from 42 in 1990 to 46 today. Approximately 71 percent of the current permanent workforce will be eligible for either regular or early retirement by 2010, and 40 percent of those are expected to take advantage of their retirement eligibility.
Even as the workforce shrinks, the number of layers of hierarchy continues to increase, especially near the top. The paradoxical result: a workforce with steadily increasing numbers of supervisors and steadily declining accountability. The workforce feels more and more overworked while at the same time its skills move further and further out of balance with the needs of the public it serves.
This is especially critical when the needs of the public are to be safe from its own nuclear weapons. The American public has become more aware of this with a series of highly public mishaps with the United State's nuclear weapons arsenal which resulted in the removal of the Air Force's top general, Michael Moseley, as well as the top civilian, Michael Wynne, after an outside investigation concluded that the Air Force had not adequately heeded warning signs that its nuclear expertise, performance and stewardship were eroding over a period of years.
With its focus on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense (DoD) has lost focus on management of our nuclear weapons, only to realize that they are overdue to retool their nuclear strategy days before the election and to rethink workforce planning. Defense Secretary Robert Gates joins the national debate today when he delivers his first extensive speech on nuclear arms.
Both presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, state they support the long-standing U.S. commitment to eventually eliminate nuclear arms. However, “eventually” is still likely a long way away. In the meantime, we need to be assured that the government is not asleep at the switch… literally.
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