When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine could not afford to waste time establishing an official drone corps before deploying unmanned quadcopters onto the battlefield. Ukrainian soldiers did not pass a formal accreditation process and earn a skill identifier before assignment to these previously non-existent units, either. Instead, a whole-of-nation collaboration allowed civilian innovators to partner with Ukrainian intelligence and cyber units to rapidly create a new military unit, Aerorozvidka, and deploy an innovative threat against the Russian invasion.

The 2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy states that “people execute the strategy” and will be critical in great-power competition or a future conflict. Senior U.S. defense leaders tout that people are the U.S. military’s “greatest strength” and that the department is in a global war for talent. Yet no major program focuses on innovation and investment in talent management on par with the innovation and investment seen in countless other tangible systems. The department is pursuing sixth-generation fighter aircraft but is seemingly unphased by second-generation talent management systems, processes, and policies. To get serious about winning current and future conflicts, the military needs a talented, flexible, and skilled force, and the Defense Department should take on the thorny tasks of talent management reform.

Despite numerous calls for change over the last two decades, talent management reform has mostly been on the fringes. The policy changes keep pace with quality-of-life enhancements offered outside the military, such as enhanced parental leave, marginally more flexibility in the up-or-out promotion system, and updated grooming standards. In 2013, the department made the most significant shift by removing the restrictions on women from combat arms. These changes are needed progress but represent incremental, insufficient adjustments.

Unless the U.S. military’s talent management system becomes exponentially more agile, America will struggle to win wars. The speed at which the nature of modern warfare is evolving necessitates that the U.S. military remove the friction between services and components of the total force so that the department can identify and employ the right talent at the right place at the right time. The U.S. military should embrace a truly permeable and agile talent ecosystem that recognizes servicemembers as so much more than occupational and skill codes that are five to 15 years behind society. The undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, charged with ensuring efficient and effective support of wartime and peacetime operations of the total force, is uniquely empowered to do this.

In 2024, the U.S. military has almost no idea how many people in its ranks can fly drones, write software, or perform countless other civilian skills that lack official military codes. Existing personnel systems cannot fathom having expertise outside of one’s primary occupation, so the reserve components of the armed forces — and even many active or civilian members — are not fully valued. Even when they have skill codes, services and components create talent silos — inefficiencies that are no longer acceptable. Military personnel bureaucracy usually lags society, but the department ought to treat talent management like a modernization priority and demand better.

Close the Talent Chain

The OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop framework distills warfare down to a competition of speed. The actor that can identify and apply force against the enemy’s interests the fastest will achieve victory. Academics can argue about the changing character of war and analyze different modes of warfare, but the nature of war is unchanging: People, augmented by technology, must exert power over an adversary to break their will to fight. America’s ability to achieve a faster OODA loop than its enemies will depend on the ability to identify critical points in the conflict and then deploy the right talent against them as quickly as possible.

The first quarter of the 21st century has nearly passed, and the lessons from both the wars in the Middle East and the current war in Ukraine offer a warning: Personnel policies designed in the industrial age won’t survive modern warfare. When technology experts saw the horribly outdated methods the U.S. Air Force was using to plan aerial refueling sorties, they called on the Defense Innovation Unit to rapidly modernize “the Gonkulator” — a $2 million software project that immediately paid for itself in saved fuel and flight costs. Imagine if the department tried to estimate the lost mission value from similarly outdated and inefficient talent management practices.

The Joint Force Is Neither Joint nor Agile

Although the myriad personnel management software applications may have been updated over the last 30 years, all of the services (with the possible exception of the Space Force) are still managing their people according to policies designed in the 1970s and 1980s. Fifty years ago, American defense leaders reshaped policy to reconcile the loss in Vietnam and prepare for a massive conflict against the Soviet Union. These policies are rooted in industrial-era artifacts like occupational specialty codes, long-term assignments to billets, and an assumption that servicemembers are interchangeable cogs in a system designed for mass and uniformity.

Unique skills are assets — not defects — and the military’s industrial-era talent management systems struggle to account for modern careers and are too slow to keep pace with today’s threats. Reserve and guard members have civilian careers that do not always align with their military occupation, while active-duty members frequently have valuable skills that either lack a skill code or are outside of their occupation. Whether it’s software or psychology, the U.S. military should be aware of and have access to all the talents of its members.

It took years to finally create skill identifiers for digital technology, and yet many of them are vendor-specific or only count toward a particular military program. Unlike foreign-language certifications, these digital skill identifiers provide no credit for civilian experience (professional or hobbyist). This is a critical failure as the Department of Defense warns of a lack of key skills.

When the department does track talent, service silos create artificial inefficiencies — shortages in one service that can be filled by excesses in another. America is one nation with one Defense Department, and a truly joint force would allow for easy cross-service collaboration. Instead, the department needs to embrace “beyond team” talent and “extreme teaming.” The Navy or Space Force should be able to tap an infantryman in the National Guard with civilian expertise in data science for a few days or weeks to create analytics dashboards, but current policies for approval, funding, and compensating such scenarios are severely restricted or, at best, unclear and outdated. Specifically, the department needs to address outdated policies that emphasize year-long mobilizations and lock out the Individual Ready Reserve.

Military leaders primarily think of their people as billets on an organizational chart — “spaces and faces.” This limits the pool of talent interested because few members of the reserve component want to take a 6- to 12-month break from their day jobs. Worse, this approach seeks generalists instead of specialists and measures value by billets filled instead of work delivered. If commanders shift from billets to key events, deliverables, and outcomes, they can break up their work into more appealing projects — gigs — and get more mission out of their limited budgets. Unfortunately, some of the best talent is almost entirely locked out of the fight.

The Individual Ready Reserve is a manpower pool composed of individuals who have previously served in the active or reserve component and no longer have an obligation to serve but have not left the military completely. This force is larger than the entire Marine Corps — and a gold mine of critical talent — but these reservists are treated as a “break-glass” contingency force that is a pen stroke away from full civilians, unable to contribute due to each service’s own policies. In the face of recruiting and retention crises, the Individual Ready Reserve is a key demographic. It is more difficult and time-consuming to recruit and train a civilian than to mobilize someone from the Individual Ready Reserve.

The Individual Ready Reserve serves an important role, offering precisely the flexibility that sabbaticals and other changes on the margin offer. Managing two careers, education, and families is not easy, and the Individual Ready Reserve allows servicemembers to take a break from drilling without leaving the military. This status also enables reserve spouses of active-duty and drilling reserve troops to keep serving without risking concurrent deployment or mobilization.

Members of the Individual Ready Reserve are not allowed to have common access cards, effectively locking them out from most digital systems like military email and personnel systems even when they have skills and a willingness to serve. When these members do find a mission to support, they can begin work immediately, but they must complete all readiness requirements — a process that can take two months — before being eligible for pay.

The inefficiencies caused by outdated talent management systems, processes, and policies are creating strategic risk. The good news is that a solution is closer and cheaper than the department realizes.

Agile Talent Is a Weapon System

GigEagle is a real-time marketplace for talent across the joint force that links mission stakeholders with the right talent at the right time, regardless of location, using precision talent-sourcing algorithms and a mobile-enabled user interface. This platform, which we run, is a great tool and units and users are flocking to it. But as with many challenges in national security, policy is a more significant hurdle than technology. The department should develop policies promoting an enterprise talent architecture that unlocks the data scattered in silos across the department, clarify funding mechanisms that can penetrate service silos, and cut the red tape that often keeps reservists out of the fight.

GigEagle is currently a prototype — led by a multi-service team with congressional seed funding and incubated by the Air Force’s AFWERX, the Space Force’s Space Systems Center, the Army’s 75th Innovation Command, and the Marine Innovation Unit — built on commercial technology sourced and adapted by the Defense Innovation Unit. The department should create an agile joint talent program office to operate and scale GigEagle across the Defense Department.

GigEagle is the U.S. military’s joint system for the agile talent ecosystem. Just like a joint weapons capability, GigEagle represents a new, joint talent management capability that should have a joint program office. This is both symbolic and pragmatically tactical. A joint program office signals commitment to modernization and provides an entity for the manpower and funding to operate and scale the full suite of capabilities. The Chief Talent Management Office and the Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Office are key partners. They should help shape this program office as they represent the joint interests of using AI for human capital across the joint force.

To enable truly joint talent, the department should establish a defense working capital fund and empower this joint program office to serve as its clearinghouse, just as the Defense Innovation Unit and National Security Innovation Capital serve similar joint purposes. Approving a universal funding reimbursable authority for cross-service talent matches is an alternative option, but it punts the work down to additional offices, which is inefficient and more error-prone than a centralized solution. A working capital fund category also allows the department to centrally manage some of the mobilization funds without increasing the defense budget.

Further, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness should update policy to allow (but not force) members of the Individual Ready Reserve to be issued common access cards so that they have access to essential tools. The policy change should also explicitly allow unit commanders to waive health and fitness requirements for members of this reserve to mobilize domestically for up to 30 days. Leaders can sign off on high-risk training events, so they should be able to allow a data scientist to skip a physical fitness test and get paid for a short, voluntary mobilization. The services already grant similar waivers for other situations, and this simple policy change would allow these members to start working with pay immediately.

Talent Agility Matters Right Now

The available evidence seems to indicate that China is preparing for total war. Its military-civil fusion harmonizes national priorities toward a single goal. By contrast, the U.S. military is not even ready to unlock the full talent potential of its joint total force due to policy handcuffs. If China initiates a war, the U.S. military should expect to feel the costs on day zero. The costs could be catastrophic, but the United States can mitigate or even avert them if the Department of Defense takes action to enable agile talent management across the joint force before the fighting starts. Making a joint program office for talent innovation can both benefit the current force and prepare personnel and manpower software systems to better integrate with large-scale mobilization systems and authorities in the event of a major conflict.

Talent agility is not just a mission enabler — it is an innovation and retention driver. Google is famous for giving employees 20 percent of their time for non-work projects, which have yielded some of their greatest breakthroughs, while Salesforce pioneered giving 1 percent of time, products, and profits to society. Survey data from soldiers leaving the Army in 2021 showed that they care deeply about serving but reach a point where the service no longer feels worth it. It may seem counterintuitive, but giving soldiers an authorized way to have agency to lean into innovative projects — and have a more personal sense of contribution to the mission — may be an answer to the growing personnel crisis.

People — not technology — are America’s decisive military advantage. The American military trains leaders to be bold, creative, and innovative, and civilian leadership at the secretariat level should act now to unlock human capital for modern wars. Personnel policy reform is hard work and these changes are critical now. Defense Department policymakers and Congress have a crucial opportunity to ensure that America has the policy foundations to bring the whole of the military — and, if needed, the whole of society — to bear against America’s enemies. To do so, they should eschew the current, antiquated talent management paradigms that no longer support national objectives.

Jim Perkins is an officer in the Army Reserve and an expert in national security, emerging technology, and military personnel policy. He previously served in the Army’s 75th Innovation Command and is now a product manager supporting the launch of GigEagle. He has previously published in War on the Rocks, the Modern Warfare Institute, and other outlets.

Mike McGinley serves as a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve and is the creator and director of the Defense Department’s GigEagle Agile Talent Ecosystem. His views are shaped by decades of operating at the intersection of the public and private sectors, including leading the Boston office of the Defense Innovation Unit and U.S. Cyber Command’s commercial innovation team.

The views in this article are those of the authors and do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: Airman 1st Class Leonid Soubbotine