Building a Healthy MQ-1/9 RPA Pilot Community Designing a Career Field Planning Tool
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C O R P O R A T I O N Building a Healthy MQ-1/9 RPA Pilot Community Designing a Career Field Planning Tool Tara L. Terry, Chaitra M. Hardison, David Schulker, Alexander C. Hou, Leslie Adrienne Payne For more information on this publication, visit www.rand.org/t/RR2018 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this publication. ISBN: 978-0-8330-9874-0 Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2018 RAND Corporation R® is a registered trademark. Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org Preface Remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) and the personnel that operate them are well understood to be crucial to mission success in today’s Air Force, and demand for skilled pilots continues to grow rapidly. However, recent studies have suggested that personnel in the RPA pilot career field are dissatisfied with aspects of the job and are experiencing stress as a result. Although those studies suggest that a variety of workplace factors are leading to the stress and dissatisfaction, a large portion of them relate to issues associated with career field planning. These career field planning issues exist, in part, because of the newness and rapid growth of the RPA enterprise. The 18X RPA pilot force (those whose first and only rated job is as an RPA pilot) is only six years old, and plans for the future of the career field are still evolving. Moreover, as the rapid growth in demand for 18X pilots has outpaced the Air Force’s ability to produce them, the Air Force is now struggling to train and retain enough personnel to meet the demand. As a result, Air Force leadership has recognized that a more thoughtful and stable plan for how to manage the career field is needed to ensure the health of the force in the future. The Director of Training and Readiness (AF/A3T) therefore asked RAND Project AIR FORCE to assist in building a long-term field planning model that addresses those force health issues and the timeline required to build a healthy and sustainable career field. This report documents RAND’s efforts to develop that long-term career field planning model; explains its main features, underlying content, and data inputs; and describes key technical aspects of the model. More specifically, this study (1) used input from Air Force leadership, stakeholders, and subject-matter experts to define what a healthy and sustainable RPA pilot career field shape across commissioned years of service (CYOS) might look like in the long term in terms of desired end-state requirements that incorporate aspects meant to improve satisfaction within the career field, and (2) built a linear programming model that specifies the number and type of RPA pilots that should be produced annually from the training pipeline to achieve that end-state career field shape across CYOS. Using this linear programming model, the RAND team then explored the implications of a few pilot production and retention scenarios for the long-term health of the career field when compared with this set of desired end-state requirements. This report is intended to provide information about the development of the model. It should also be of interest to those concerned with the technical modeling aspects of career field health planning. This research was commissioned by the U.S. Air Force and conducted within the Manpower, Personnel, and Training Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE as part of a fiscal year 2016 project, Building a Healthy and Sustainable RPA Career Field Using 18X, ALFA Tour, and 11U/12U Pilots. iii RAND Project AIR FORCE RAND Project AIR FORCE (PAF), a division of the RAND Corporation, is the U.S. Air Force’s federally funded research and development center for studies and analyses. PAF provides the Air Force with independent analyses of policy alternatives affecting the development, employment, combat readiness, and support of current and future air, space, and cyber forces. Research is conducted in four programs: Force Modernization and Employment; Manpower, Personnel, and Training; Resource Management; and Strategy and Doctrine. The research reported here was prepared under contract FA7014-16-D-1000. Additional information about PAF is available on our website: http://www.rand.org/paf/ This report documents work originally shared with the U.S. Air Force on June 7, 2016. The draft report, issued in September 2016, was reviewed by formal peer reviewers and U.S. Air Force subject-matter experts. iv Contents Preface ............................................................................................................................................ iii Figures............................................................................................................................................ vi Tables ........................................................................................................................................... viii Summary ........................................................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... xvii Abbreviations ............................................................................................................................. xviii 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Overview of the Types of Pilots Flying MQ-1/9s .....................................................................................1 The Importance of Long-Term Career Field Management .......................................................................2 Our Approach ............................................................................................................................................3 Organization of This Report ......................................................................................................................6 2. RPA Career Field Model Overview ............................................................................................ 7 Characteristics Defining a Healthy Career Field .......................................................................................7 Initiatives to Make the RPA Enterprise Healthy .......................................................................................8 Model Inputs and Assumptions ...............................................................................................................10 RPA Model Objective Function and Constraints ....................................................................................24 3. Comparison of Two Production Tempos .................................................................................. 28 ASAP Production Tempo Results ...........................................................................................................29 Balanced Career Field Management Approach .......................................................................................34 Summary .................................................................................................................................................40 4. The Impact of Growth in Desired End-State Requirements on Production and Inventory Levels .................................................................................................................................. 41 Overview .................................................................................................................................................41 How Long It Takes to Meet Desired End-State Requirements ...............................................................42 Annual Production Numbers Required to Meet Desired End-State Requirements .................................45 Impact on Numbers of Unassigned RPA Pilots ......................................................................................48 Impact on Inventory Composition ...........................................................................................................49 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................49 5. How the Model Can Be Used to Support RPA Policy Analysis ............................................... 51 Appendix A. Interview Participants, Themes, and Questions .....................................................