Multidimensional military manpower planning based on a career path approach

This article presents a modeling approach to tackle the multidimensional military manpower planning problem. Requirements relevant to military manpower planning include the need to maintain distributions of manpower characteristics (such as rank and age) with respect to career advancement within acceptable proximity to desired norms. Moreover, they include ensuring that the personnel allocated to the various roles of the defence force will be adequate throughout the planning period. Addressing these tasks simultaneously represents a significant challenge for human resources managers. This paper proposes a model that assigns personnel to career paths (CPs) pre-defined as feasible prior to optimization. Adequate solutions through this model are generated by mixed integer goal programming. This solving approach is applied to a case study of the Belgian Defence’s manpower and results in valuable insights for military human resources managers. For the illustration of our approach, we focus on a military organization, but it could be used for any hierarchical organization, such as a police force or a university.