"What's the most important thing the military should do while going through this downsizing period?" v2

While my perspective is largely that of an enlisted airman, I've worked enough in joint capacities to see that wastefulness is a branch agnostic phenomena. We're all guilty of it. Where I see this waste stemming from is that there's no real incentive in place, from a career standpoint, to reward efficiency.

At least in the AF, the ratings systems for both enlisted and commissioned personnel seem to favor big numbers; more people managed, larger, more expensive projects, and of course, being able to flash more digits after the dollar sign. 

As far I can tell, the ratings system actually punishes efficiency. Without context or a means of measuring effectiveness, peers are vying for a limited number of promotions and the only way to stand out is demonstrate an ever increasing span of control and influence. Again, more money, more people, more projects. 

While the means exist in a business landscape to analyze and encourage efficiency, there aren't really any measurement tools in place for the ratings system (arguably what determines the course of our careers) to reward the shrinking of figures; less money, less people, less projects. Worse yet, without incentive to be good resource stewards and effective managers, the skills required for both are first left to wither and die on the vine but then are never replaced. 

Speaking from an enlisted airman perspective, we spend more and more time divesting our experience into the rating system itself, writing for the sake of writing, rather than mentoring our subordinates or honing our managerial craft. Good people, who are educated and could be so much more effective, are squandered by relegating them to full time OPR/EPR administrators and the effect this has on training and readiness is enormous. But this behavior is expected of our SNCOs in particular, and to spend any less time hacking away on EPRs would only be detrimental to their own rating.  

Of course this is just one of many, many examples of systemic wastefulness that is entirely within our control.

Ultimately, waste is being allowed to flourish even to this day, in a post-sequestration environment that threatens our very jobs and benefits, because there's every career incentive to be wasteful, and little to no career incentive to be efficient. So how can we fix it? Change the rating system by emphasizing and incentivizing efficiency. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has a few ideas how to go about doing this, but just to get the ball rolling I’ll share a few of them later today.

Sincerly,

John