Human Dimension Metrics

This past week, I read the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. I had planned to use it as the basis for this week’s blog post (and I was actually going to post on time for once!) but there’s just too much to it, so it will have to wait. Suffice it to say, at least for now, if you’re looking for a great book on the Human Dimension, look at Peak.

So instead, tonight, I am going to reflect on metrics and the Human Dimension. This week, I went down to Columbus, GA for the Maneuver Center of Excellence Industry Day. It was a great opportunity to hear from the new Commanding General, BG Wesley, and the Commandant of the Infantry School, BG Jones.

It also offered an opportunity to talk to a number of people, both from the MCOE and other contractors, about the human dimension program. I was surprised to hear, on both sides, the issues people are having in attaching value to aspects of the program. In one case, it was in valuation of training. Actually, “surprised” is an understatement.

How do you value a new piece of hardware? You look at the increase in protection, the cost (or increase in cost) of the new equipment, and the costs associated with failure, and do fairly basic arithmetic. How do you value the human dimension program? It’s really not all that different. It’s that we aren’t used to thinking about it.

I have proposed several human dimension programs. All have associated costs. In some cases, as a contractor, I cannot access all of the numbers, but can provide some of them. Below, I will explain how I do this. I am not including my costs, as that information is company proprietary.

Program 1

In program 1, I ask the question whether any of certain personality and/or cognitive traits, if added to the ASVAB, would do a better job of selecting recruits in to the Army and helping them select MOSs for which they are suited. Today, the Army recruits approximately 60,000 soldiers each year; more than 1/3 do not complete their initial term. The numbers, as broken down by Brad Carson at CSIS earlier this week, is that 10-12% sign up but do not ever make it onto the bus for boot camp; 12-15% do not complete boot camp; and another 12-15% exit the Army at some point before the end of their initial term, for any number of reasons.

Basic training costs between $54k and $72k per soldier, depending on whether the MOS has One Station Unit Training or the soldier has to move between Basic and Advanced Individual Training. For ease, we’re going to assume an average of $63k per person. Of the 60k who start the Army in a year, and using the lowest numbers provided by Mr. Carson, 6k do not make it on the bus, 7200 do not complete boot camp, and another 7200 do not complete the remainder of their initial term. Ignoring the costs to recruit the 6k who don’t make it on the bus, just over 14.4k are still expenses to the American taxpayer, to the tune of almost $1B just for the cost of Basic Training. That does not include any additional costs the person may incur – including potential on-going medical costs through the VA.

The goal of the program is not to reduce initial term attrition to zero; it is to reduce the recruiting goal to 50k. This would save money for a lot of reasons, including time and effort expended by recruiters, and might reduce the number of recruiters needed (opening up spots in the reduced Army for other jobs). There will be cost savings in terms of training, and materiel, and salary, and benefits. And all of these are hard to quantify without more information than I can access. But I do know that reducing the recruits by 10k at 63k each will save $630M each year. Even reducing by 7200 (half of the individuals who don’t finish boot camp, and half that don’t make it through initial term) would be $454M PER YEAR.

Because my study is a very small fraction of this, and is not necessarily an on-going cost (though certainly could be as more metrics are developed and soldiering has new, different needs), it saves money.

Program 2

Program 2 asks the question of whether brain training programs transfer to real-world benefit to the trainee: do they do anything other than make the trainee better at playing the video game?

This is a significantly more complex program, but it’s also significantly shorter. Unfortunately, complexity = expensive, making it a hard sell.

Except that DoD (including the Department of the Army, but not only Army) continues to fund millions of dollars worth of studies on brain training – and none of them are looking at transfer. The successful completion of Program 2 would provide a template for testing transfer, and allow the research organizations to spend less money on basic research without any evidence of transfer. Unfortunately, I cannot get any current numbers of the money still being spent on brain training programs by DoD to provide that end of the equation.

Program 3

Program 3 is not mine; it’s a training program I heard about the other night. It was developed by a Large Contractor at the cost of $1M (in Independent Research & Development (IR&D) money), and was never completed or sold because of this metric issue: they – both the company and the Army customers – couldn’t figure out how to properly demonstrate its worth.

A single CTC rotation costs $30M for 1 month. Therefore, being well prepared for the rotation is critical. The value of this training would have been sending soldiers more prepared for the rotation. Better preparation could be demonstrated before going by showing improved scores on basic tasks. It could also be demonstrated after the fact by improved performance at the CTC.

Again, the numbers are not as clean as in Program 1, but that’s in large part because I am not familiar with how much the company was charging, how much increase in performance was expected, etc. But clearly, with CTC being so important, organizations invest in preparation. Comparing those costs are the key here.

In conclusion….

Many people still seem to think that the whole idea of the Human Dimension Program is grounded in “touchy feely stuff”. It is not. It is grounded in science – both hard and, yes, sometimes social science. There are real, true costs to implementing these changes, and real, true costs to the status quo. But both sides of the equation can have valuation attached. The costs may not be as easy to find (at least for contractors) as those for materiel, but they are available to those who can go look for them.