…automation is a great tool for killing busy work.

Staff Sgt. Ryan Jette, USAF

I posted before about the Navy allowing their graduate students to use automation in optimizing officer assignments and was happy to read that the Air Force is now providing licenses for any airman to iterate locally.

The administrative aspects of the military is a bureaucracy like any other. However, a business must make a profit to continue to exist whereas the military is a monopoly. There is external competitive pressure to maintain a competitive edge over our adversaries, but without internal profit/loss pressure permeating the organization, military administration is slow to adapt to changing technological and cultural environments. To be fair, our government is designed to be slow to adapt. We don’t want to react to every data point, but we should be to respond to evolving trends and I am fearful that the beaurocrats are setting the strategy.

Perhaps a culture that promotes automating the “non-value added but required” aspects of each day will allow time to focus on the essential. Perhaps every military administrative task should be in a workflow with traceability to national defense strategy?