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The Institutional Requirements Process Compounds Undermanning Throughout the Air Force

• Undermanning and insufficient funding affect career fields and institutional requirements throughout the Air Force. There is not enough funding or personnel to fill all the jobs that the service has identified.
• Institutional requirements are generally not taken into account in restructuring and force management decisions or manpower analyses, but doing so would address and help alleviate chronic undermanning.
• There is little formal documentation or justification for filling institutional requirements with active-duty officers. Detailed information on these requirements could indicate whether some positions could be filled by other types of personnel, such as reservists or civilians.

Institutional Requirements Pose a Challenge to Career Fields and Individual Officers' Career Paths

• Career fields must share personnel to fill institutional requirements, and this can lead to undermanning in these fields and a reluctance among career field managers to make personnel available to fill these positions.
• Unlike core career fields, institutional requirements have no centralized management structure. Without a career field manager, the organizations that depend on these requirements to meet their staffing needs may be saddled with personnel who are not qualified to fill the positions.
• Some institutional requirements are more difficult to fill than others. For example, academic positions have strict qualifications and may represent a significant diversion from an officer's chosen career path.
• The Air Force's current system for filling institutional requirements may prevent officers who wish to extend their time in these positions from doing so.

In an era of force reductions and shrinking military budgets, the U.S. Air Force has found it increasingly difficult to fill manpower authorizations — not only operational and staff positions that support mission demands but also additional requirements for particular career fields. One source of these additional requirements is institutional requirements, or manpower requirements that do not align with a traditional, functional career field but are needed to support the Air Force institution. Examples include recruiter, instructor, generalist staff officer, and operational support positions. The challenge for career field managers is that institutional requirements compete for the same pool of personnel. These assignments may also affect the career development of individual officers. Through discussions with key stakeholders in the Air Force and the other services, consultations with industry experts, and a review of data on the current and historical use of institutional requirements and associated processes in the Air Force, this report documents how the Air Force could reduce the impact of filling these positions on traditional career fields while ensuring that the organizations that depend on institutional requirements are staffed with the qualified personnel they need. To achieve this goal, the Air Force will need to pursue multiple strategies, such as a periodic review and elimination of positions that are persistently vacant or no longer valid requirements, steps to make more personnel available to fill these positions, converting some types of institutional requirements to their own career fields, or changing how institutional requirements are managed.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Institutional Requirements Overview

• Chapter Three

  Reducing the Impact of Institutional Requirements

• Chapter Four

  Assessment of Individual Institutional Requirement Categories

• Chapter Five

  Conclusions and Recommendations

• Appendix

  Manning Levels for Core Career Fields