The Army needs a strategic plan to address its emerging officer accession and retention challenges, GAO has said.
It said accession and retaining high-quality officers in the current environment of increasing deployments and armed conflict may be two of the all-volunteer force’s greatest challenges.
The military services go through military academies, ROTC, and officer candidate schools to access officer candidates and generally have met most or all of their overall accession needs for newly commissioned officers, but the Army has faced challenges, according to GAO-07-224.
It said the Army did not meet officer needs in fiscal 2001 and 2003 and expects to struggle with future accessions.
Between fiscal 2001 and 2005 the Army almost doubled the number of OCS commissioned officers because of academy and ROTC shortfalls, decreased ROTC scholarships and a need to expand its officer corps, the report said.
However, it said OCS is expected to reach capacity by fiscal 2007 and resource limits such as housing and classroom space hamper further expansion.
The Army is implementing and considering initiatives to improve officer retention, but the initiatives are not integrated and either will not affect retention until 2009 or have not been funded, GAO said, adding that the Army lacks an integrated strategic plan to address its retention shortfalls.
