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Post–Promotion Board Reporting Requirements Generally Meet the Objectives for Which They Were Established

• Comparative promotion outcomes seem, on their face, to be valid barometers of the quality of officers in various categories. However, the validity is enhanced when the services do not adhere to the zone-of-consideration and have-served policies that inappropriately narrow the field of view represented in the data. Moreover, the persistence of some unfavorable comparisons after applying refined policies indicates that continued attention is required to the quality-sharing objectives in the Goldwater–Nichols Act, the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act, and Office of the Secretary of Defense policy.

There Are Impediments to Effective Reporting

• Ill-defined zones of promotion consideration and restrictive and apparently contradictory have-served policies have created a reporting framework that sometimes obscures relevant quality comparisons and virtually ensures inconsistent reporting practices across different services and within the same service for different boards.

Changes Are Needed

• Changes in the reporting requirements are needed to simplify and clarify the counts of officers included in various reporting categories and to minimize unfavorable comparisons that are attributable to the random distribution of quality in small samples rather than to true quality differences in the larger populations from which they are drawn.

Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) have established statutory and policy benchmarks to gauge the quality of officers selected for service on the Joint Staff or OSD staff or for designation as joint-qualified officers or Acquisition Corps members. Officers with service on the Joint Staff or OSD staff are expected to be promoted at a rate no less than that of officers with service on their service headquarters staff. Joint-qualified officers and Acquisition Corps members are expected to be promoted at a rate no less than that of line or equivalent officers in their services. This report examines alternative policies and practices to better align post–promotion board reporting with these objectives.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Statutory and Regulatory Issues and Alternatives

• Chapter Three

  Post–Promotion Board Reporting Using Alternative Policies

• Chapter Four

  Conclusions and Recommendations

• Appendix A

  Confidence Bounds

• Appendix B

  Feasibility of Meeting Multiple Objectives

• Appendix C

  Recommended Legislative Changes

• Appendix D

  Recommended Reporting Instruction Changes

• Appendix E

  Revised Post–Promotion Board Reporting Format