Streamlining Cost Estimation for Large Department of Defense Organizations

About this book

Manpower decisionmakers need to produce consistent and repeatable cost estimations to understand the budget implications of alternative total force mixes. This report describes a prototype tool researchers created that uses data from the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Full Cost of Manpower (FCoM) model, which includes such cost factors as compensation, health care, recruiting, and training. The prototype tool expands on FCoM by creating a method to streamline cost estimations for large Department of Defense (DoD) organizations, providing summary output in the form of graphs and tables, and allowing the user to run various scenarios in which billet counts are changed and the effect on cost can be observed. In this report, researchers describe the prototype tool and demonstrate its utility on a hypothetical organization to show how it could be used when determining costs for a real organization. With additional development, this tool could be useful for DoD and service personnel involved in manpower policy and decisionmaking, as well as the broader DoD research community.