Excess equipment is an albatross hanging from the Army’s neck. Two decades of conflict, increasing operational requirements since the end of the post-9/11 wars, and lack of placing mundane requirements on training plans has left the service with a severe problem: too much stuff, too often in the wrong places. Worse, given changes in the Army’s equipment transfer standard policy, excess problems may mutate into decreased equipment readiness due to increases in unforeseen maintenance costs. Efforts over the years to address the issue—with Unit Equipping and Reuse Working Groups, for example, and All Army Excess Campaign Plan—have been unable to make progress toward solving the problem. The latest effort, Rapid Removal of Excess (R2E), is in its nascent stages. But applying new practices to the same problem without addressing why the excess problem occurs will only lead to more rounds of R2E-like programs. R2E isn’t the answer; culture change is.

On April 27, 2021, the Senate Committee on Armed Services received testimony from leading authorities on management challenges and opportunities within the Department of Defense. Among the three witnesses, Dr. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and tenured professor at the Wharton School of Business, provided particularly candid insights. “I worry that DoD culture is a threat to national security,” he told members of the committee.

As Grant explains elsewhere—in his book Think Again—a willingness to rethink assumptions and revise opinions is a hallmark of the best minds. It is not, however, a hallmark of the DoD culture, or the culture of DoD’s chief landpower service—a culture that is slow to adapt and stuck in its ways. While his testimony centered on people rather than technological innovation, his description of the 1950s-era management practices DoD uses is applicable to both. These practices decrease innovation opportunities and decision-maker willingness to accept new ideas. To address this national security threat, the Army must reflect on and change these dated practices.

Stuck in the ‘50s

Grant identifies three hallmarks defining the “1950s-era management” embodied in DoD culture: “that is too risky,” “that is not the way we have always done it,” and “that will never work here.” To find a sustainable solution for excess management, the Army must be willing to accept risk and challenge these outdated notions.

As we look deeper into Grant’s three points, the Army’s goal setting and planning methodology is deeply entrenched in a real-world management style developed in the 1950s by Peter Drucker, an economist, author, and teacher often called “the founder of modern management.” The management style Drucker created is called management by objectives, or MBOs for short. Within the MBO design, managers set and track goals using five steps:

  • Define the goal.
  • Share the goal with employees.
  • Encourage employees to participate.
  • Monitor progress.
  • Evaluate and reward.

A commander’s role within the Army operations process directly correlates to MBO goal setting methodology, or in Army parlance, achieving a desired end state. Army Field Manual 5-0, The Operations Process defines that role with a six-part model: understand, visualize, describe, direct, lead, and assess. Returning to the initial problem of addressing excess equipment and R2E, the similarities become immediately apparent. A hypothetical operations process approach is:

  • Understand – The Army has excess equipment causing readiness issues.
  • Visualize – The Army must develop a solution addressing commander requirements to train and maintain equipment readiness standards and accountability.
  • Describe – Commanders must be unburdened from excess equipment and quickly transfer it to where there is need in the Army.
  • Direct – The Army will change its equipment transfer standards and use the Army Field Support Battalion Modernization Displacement and Repair Sites to expeditiously unburden commanders from unneeded and under-maintained equipment.
  • Lead – The Army will issue an order directing affected Army commands, Army service component commands, and direct reporting units to conduct R2E operations.
  • Assess – The Army will measure the level of equipment turned in for redistribution or divestiture to determine level of unburdening via weekly updates.

If we use Drucker’s five-step MBO approach, a pattern emerges:

  • Define the goal – Commanders will be unburdened from excess equipment.
  • Share the goal – Senior leaders must generate discussion and publish an execute order.
  • Encourage subordinates – Commanders will be incentivized by the prospect of more time to execute training and maintain higher readiness instead of endless inventories and maintenance schedules.
  • Monitor progress – Commands will provide weekly updates on turn-in process during R2E operations.
  • Evaluate and Reward – As excess equipment is reduced, units and commanders will be rewarded with additional white space on calendar and increased training funds.

In this management scenario using R2E, whether defined in terms of the operations process or MBO, excess equipment may have been reduced and commanders unburdened, but the method has not fixed the overarching problem of why excess and deferred maintenance existed in the first place. One of the criticisms of the MBO approach is the tendency of goals to grow stagnant due to plans driven from the top down receiving minimal buy-in from the employee (this is not to say that the bottom-up approach of Unit Equipping and Reuse Working Groups–Enhanced was any better eight years ago). While the carrot for unburdening commanders of excess equipment is present, we have no quantifiable metric to measure the level of unburdening a command should go through to achieve its desired end state. Additionally, opponents of MBOs point out when targets are set without clear direction, results will be achieved by any means necessary. This can and has led in other organizations to ethical fading, which occurs when we convince ourselves the ends justify our means and slowly continue down a path of unethical behavior.

OKR: A Better Way

Although some private sector organizations have successfully used MBOs, there are alternative solutions that better align with the Army’s hierarchical structure and management style. By pivoting toward a similar process evolving from MBO, the Army can adopt a more effective approach This will allow the Army to escape from the 1950s-style culture by accepting prudent risk and being open to new approaches for old problems. Furthermore, it will enable flexibility, produce creative solutions, and allow for goals to be used for not only excess management, but planning most aspects of our training calendars.

Initial R2E pilot programs at Fort Liberty, North Carolina and Fort Stewart, Georgia determined that over three hundred thousand man-hours could be saved by reducing the time for prescribed accountability and maintenance events on all equipment on hand. What if those mundane inventory, maintenance and excess reduction activities were placed on training calendars, as part of the overall goal of increasing readiness? While adding events may seem counterproductive, this practice will generate time for training in the future.

The current R2E approach is stopgap tool to address excess and makes us feel good in the short term, but the dopamine rush only lasts until excess appears again. Incorporating the mundane into our planning process will achieve amazing results if we are willing to shift our perspective and use a different tool for establishing objectives and goal setting.

An alternative planning tool is a system known as objectives and key results (OKR), developed by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s. While we acknowledge potential skepticism about replacing a seventy-year-old goal-setting system with another that came of age during the Nixon administration, Grove’s idea grew out of the inadequacy of MBOs. His method provides a way to clearly define goals with three to five measurable metrics to assess progress toward desired results. John Doerr, a venture capitalist, best-selling author, and mentee of Andy Grove, brought the OKR concept to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Doerr’s contribution to Google enabled Page and Brin to chart Google’s meteoric success. Doerr later wrote about how OKRs subsequently transformed the Gates Foundation, Apple, YouTube, and Adobe into the businesses and organizations we know today.

Andy Grove’s OKR system is characterized by the following elements based on clearly defined goals, written down and shared freely.

  • Focus and commitment to priorities.
  • Alignment and connections for teamwork.
  • Tracking for accountability.
  • Stretching for remarkable results.

Where OKRs fit into current Army framework begins with the defining the goal (desired end state). The objective is what is to be achieved (mission). The key results are how we get to the objective (essential and key tasks) and are specific, time bound, metric driven, shared, and measurable. Compared with the MBO-derived SMART objectives (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time bound), the nature of OKRs holds everyone involved accountable.

By reframing OKRs into an Army methodology via course of action (COA) development, an objectively measured end state appears. The key difference from current COA development is that the proposed process shifts the evaluation definitions for measures of performance (MOPs) and measures of effectiveness (MOEs). A COA is what we want to achieve meeting the desired goal (i.e., the objective). MOPs are the incremental steps we take to meet the larger COA (i.e., key results). And MOEs determine how well we achieved the incremental steps (i.e., a means of measurement).

The OKR methodology also, fortuitously, aligns with the mission command philosophy. Higher-level leaders provide their intent and allow subordinates to develop their own execution plans. Lower-level commands then develop their own OKRs to meet the higher-level intent.

An example of a structured OKR dealing with R2E and excess may look like this at the Army level:

  • Objective: Reduce excess equipment across the Army to increase time and funding for training.
  • Key Results:
    • Establish R2E program at two Modernization Displacement Repair Sites (MDRS) allowing for no less than 320 hours at each site for duration of eight weeks with a time utilization rate of 90 percent.
    • Cross-level excess equipment within each installation unit to reach fill rate no less than 90 percent.
    • Increase training calendar white space by 10 percent while decreasing aggregate inventory time by 10 percent.
    • Increase combat slant readiness by 5 percent over ninety days for three quarters maintaining a mechanic utilization rate of 80 percent.

Transforming this into a COA would yield the following elements:

  • COA: Reduce excess using R2E.
    • MOP 1: Establish R2E at two MDRS.
      • MOE 1: Create 320 hours on each unit’s training calendar over a period of eight weeks for turn-in of excess equipment at MDRS.
      • MOE 2: Maintain 90 percent utilization rate of 320 hours at MDRS.
    • MOP 2: Cross-level equipment across units on installation.
      • MOE 1: Fill equipment shortages up to minimum of 90 percent.
    • MOP 3: Increase training time by reducing quantity excess equipment inventories.
      • MOE 1: Decrease time for inventories per month by eight hours.
      • MOE-2: Add additional small arms range.
    • MOP 4: Increase equipment readiness.
      • MOE 1: Increase maintenance ratings by 5 percent over three months while dropping zero scheduled maintenance activities.

Google’s track record with OKRs created a culture that enabled a large organization to react quickly to a dynamic business environment. As a much larger organization, the Army needs responsive capabilities in a dynamic environment characterized by strategic competition.

We acknowledge implementing OKRs in the Army may face resistance due to entrenched management practices and a culture of risk aversion. However, these challenges can be mitigated by providing training and support for leaders at all levels, demonstrating the tangible benefits of OKRs through pilot programs, and gradually integrating OKRs into existing processes.

As Grant pointed out in his testimony, the Army’s management culture of risk aversion and resistance to change poses a national security risk. By reexamining our planning and goal-setting methodologies and adopting a system like OKRs, the Army can address the excess equipment problem more effectively and create a more adaptable and innovative organizational culture. The Army should use this opportunity for a hard conversation addressing organizational growth instead of searching for an elusive quick win. In the long run, implementing R2E as an enduring program will be a pyrrhic success institutionalizing failure. But by embracing change, the Army can win the war on excess.

Major Ian W. Black is a logistics operations officer currently serving at with Army Sustainment Command. He holds a master in military art and science and a bachelor of artis in history, and is a combat veteran.

Colonel William Parker is the garrison commander for Rock Island Arsenal. He is a former Army War College fellow at MIT for transportation and logistics, holds a master of arts in procurement and acquisition management, master in military art and science, master of operational art and science, and bachelor of arts in communications.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, United States Army Materiel Command, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. Vincent Levelev, US Army