Service member and family support organizations provide a wide range of programs designed to ease the stresses of military life and promote service member and family member well-being. Each military branch offers these programs at installations across the world at a total annual cost of billions of dollars. The financial support of these programs may be congressionally appropriated funding (APF), nonappropriated funding (NAF), or some combination. While supporting service members and their families is an ongoing priority, current defense planning calls for reducing both the size of the force and its budget (Jansen, Burrelli, Kapp, and Theohary, 2014). As the...

This chapter describes the RIE processes and recommendations the research team selected for “deep dives”: NAF accounting and NAF employee benefits. The descriptions are based on multiple sources, including the initial and final presentations delivered to the task force and additional data and information derived from research and discussions.¹

The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) issues overarching policy guidance and regulations on accounting for the DoD components, including the military services. However, each of the military services independently conducts NAF accounting functions; these include payroll, accounts payable and receivable, financial management, and recordkeeping on sales (including point of...

Sharing resources and pooling capabilities has the potential to increase efficiency and efficacy. Experience and literature by experts both suggest, however, that deep organizational changes such as program consolidation must be carefully managed. Changes such as those proposed by the RIEs and documented in Chapter Two can be difficult to achieve. Guidance from the literature and a framework through which to consider change management may prove helpful.

This chapter presents change-management best practices from expert literature. After reviewing the literature, we present a framework of eight change-management guidelines. We also examine two case studies of military support organizations that navigated...

In Chapter Three, we introduced eight guidelines for organizational change. These guidelines should be considered “best practices” because they were drawn from expert literature on management. The eight guidelines were then applied to three case studies that, like NAF accounting and NAF employee benefits, support various programs throughout DoD and the military services.

In this chapter, we focus again on the eight guidelines but this time in light of current plans to improve efficiency of NAF accounting and NAF employee benefits. The analysis here presents gaps in current change-management activities and identifies actions based on the guidelines. We presented this...

Achieving a greater efficiency of scale is frequently the goal behind organizational consolidation efforts. Leaders hope to reduce average costs by increasing an organization’s output but not its size. This is an optimistic perspective and certainly drives change, but if there are real costs associated with reorganization, these might not outweigh future savings. Cost analysis is thus essential in any strong organizational consolidation plan; such analysis allows explicit and systematic categorization of the various factors that may influence the price of moving forward and can help organizations avoid inappropriate investments.

This chapter examines the costs of developing, deploying, and maintaining...

In the previous chapter, we presented the cost analysis and results for NAF accounting efficiency efforts along three courses of action. This chapter presents a similar analysis and results for the proposed NAF employee benefits efficiency efforts. Unlike NAF accounting programs, NAF employee benefits programs include the Marine Corps.

In the first section of this chapter, we briefly review the goals and recommendations submitted by the NAF employee benefits RIE team. Whereas the NAF accounting RIE team presented three COAs to consider, the NAF employee benefits RIE team submitted goals and recommendations to move forward; thus, the analytic approach is...

Support for service members and their families is an important goal for the DoD as a whole and for each individual service. How best to balance competing financial obligations for these and more-prominent warfighting priorities is a matter of ongoing concern. The overall warfighting mission of the military can limit the improvement of support functions, particularly those that require substantial upfront investment. This doesnotmean, however, that arguments should not be made to harvest strategic opportunities and offer better support in the future. In this effort, we developed and applied a framework for change management and assessed the business...