The concept of optimality in military manpower planning

The Royal Military Academy (RMA) in Brussels, in close cooperation with the Directorate General Human Resources (DGHR) of the Belgian Defence, devel- oped a set of tools for military workforce planning for the Belgian Defence. The aim of this project was the development of a coherent manpower model and an as- sociated manpower planning toolbox that can be used by the military manpower planners of the DGHR for both short-, mid- and long term manpower planning (planning horizons vary from 3 to 20 years), and this for the entire manpower population of the Belgian Defence, including the civilian personnel. Early on in the project, it became clear that successful communication between the academic and the operational side of the project would depend heavily on the use of a common vocabulary, as the same word often turned out to have different meanings in both worlds. The concept of optimality formed an interesting point of discussion, and it turned out to be very difficult to agree on a common definition of this concept. Surprisingly enough from an academic point of view, optimality didn't appear to be the primary concern in an operational world which is often governed by budgetary constraints and political objectives whose deadlines are in practice most likely measured in terms of inter-election intervals. In this talk, we discuss the concept of an optimal workforce planning policy and show how it was implemented in the developed workforce planning tools. We illustrate its relative usefulness and/or meaninglessness with some practical examples.