In February 2024, a cohort of 62 early- to midcareer professionals—officer, enlisted, and civilian, selected from more than 120 applicants—gathered in San Diego for the ninth annual DARE Innovation Workshop. DARE is a unique opportunity for participants to troubleshoot challenges facing the services and brief their findings directly to the service chiefs. This year, Commandant of the Marine Corps General Eric Smith posed the following questions to the teams:
Quality of Life: What is an operational definition of quality of life in the service context? What are service members’ three most operative quality of life concerns? What immediate measures can the service take to address these issues?
Reserve: How can the service better leverage the Reserve to support Marines or their units’ in their mission? What capabilities should we have in the Reserve that would augment the active component in ways beyond providing additional/redundant forces? What can the service do to recruit more individuals directly into the Reserve? What can the service do to incentivize highly trained Marines exiting the active component to continue their service in the Reserve?
Quality of Life
Quality of life starts with recruiting and retaining the best and continues to be a legislative priority. Improving barracks, base housing, gyms, chow halls, child development centers, and personnel policies would contribute to a more capable and lethal force. Four of DARE’s integrated teams focused on personnel transfers, continuity of healthcare, the state of barracks, and the impact of training staff. Their recommendations were a blend of new innovative ideas, policy modernization, and successful techniques from other services and companies. Specifically, the teams recommended:
Create a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) Assist Team. Stand up a PCS Assist Team to support Marines and their families in situations that require nontraditional assistance and action. The team would be composed of civilians, but more important would be integrating the Reserve to provide local area knowledge—from cost of living to schools, housing, childcare availability, and spouse work opportunities. The team would provide information prior to PCS to ensure a seamless transition, save costs, and minimize wait times to allow Marines to focus on warfighting. The Coast Guard has tested this idea for the past four years, and it has proven effective and is highly requested by Coast Guard members.
Improve continuity of healthcare. Sponsor a 100-day joint working group with other service chiefs and the Defense Health Agency to standardize procedures, care plans, and best practices across military treatment facilities to reduce redundant efforts and unnecessary expenditures. In addition, because the military healthcare workforce is not staffed to full capacity, and opportunities for civilian personnel to fill open billets are limited, the DARE team recommended a second 100-day joint working group to identify appropriate overall staffing levels. That second working group also should identify gapped active-duty healthcare positions that could be converted to civilian positions. Finally, the team recommended increasing efforts to educate service members and dependents on their medical benefits.
Modernize barracks reports. Streamline the reports on living condition issues to allow easy action, ownership, and accountability. Technology such as QR codes could modernize the reporting process. The report would document the issues and indicate the level of intervention needed to rectify them. If reports are not completed in a reasonable time frame, command intervention might be warranted to ensure proper living conditions are maintained.
Reform instructor selection and training. Create a specific military occupational specialty (MOS) for instructors. Instructors who conduct indoctrination training have a significant impact on the next generation of service members. They teach, inspire, and set examples. Because of this high level of influence, they should have their own MOS. The service also should use reservists who teach in the civilian world as instructors and include the importance of instructors in the precept for promotion. In addition, it should invest in instructors’ technical training to develop curriculum and training aids and treat “instructor” as a special duty assignment (SDA) and remove it from the Headquarters Marine Corps Special Duty Assignment Screening Team (HSST) list to retain subject-matter experts.
Reserve Workforce
The Marine Corps Reserve possesses a wealth of expertise and a desire to support the active component. The DARE teams identified several steps the service could take to maximize the Reserve’s potential, including improving Marines’ ability to transition seamlessly from active duty to reserve and back again. The following actions—both short and long term—were recommended to enhance quality of life and maximize the potential of the Reserve:
Conduct intentional recruiting and marketing. Create a campaign focused on balancing a civilian career with being a professional warfighter.
Relocate Reserve liaison officers (RLOs). Locate RLOs—currently assigned to Marine Expeditionary Forces—at the regimental level, closer to where reservists operate. This would enable them to better understand the needs of battalions, companies, and reservists.
Establish a Reserve task force pilot program. Identify highly motivated and dedicated reservists who will be specialty coded to work with the active component. At the battalion or company level, these reservists would work with the RLOs and observe the entire one- to two-year workup cycle to identify the best times to integrate. They would be trained to conduct the mission and could change the culture of Reserve integration.
Effect a culture change. Incentivize active-duty Marines to drill and engage with the Reserve workforce. This would build a mutual understanding and foundation of trust between the two components.
Incentivize trained reservists. Consider having Marines participating in the Department of Defense’s SkillBridge Program for six months or longer incur extended obligated Reserve commitments. Currently, the program creates gapped billets, with no backfill at the unit level while the participating Marine remains on active duty. While a Marine is on obligated service, however, the unit can request a backfill, and the Marine is more likely to remain in a geographic location near a Marine unit. In addition, the SkillBridge contract is contingent on the Reserve contract, so a Marine would be more likely to remain in the Reserve per the contractual agreement.
Change HSST regulations. Allow Marines who want to remain in the workforce to decline special duty assignment orders and accept Reserve orders to continue service within their MOS and become a selected reservist. Currently, a Marine who fails to submit for or accept obligated service for an SDA receives an RE-3O reenlistment code and is not eligible for promotion, reenlistment, commissioning or warrant officer programs, special pay, education programs, or involuntary separation pay. While HSST will be affected by the change, the alternative is the loss of a Marine to a sister Sea Service or the civilian world.
Provide tactical-level education. Provide education on transitioning into the Reserve at a Marine’s point of accession and key junctures, such as during professional military education. Early and ongoing education on career options would provide Marines with choices to continue serving. In addition, active-duty and Reserve enlistment should not be tracked differently. Transition assistance should be tracked at the O-5 command level for both components. Tracking all reenlistments would provide tactical commanders incentive to assist with the transition from active duty to the Reserve.
An Exceptional Experience
This year’s DARE workshop was an engaging, productive event. It provided an unparalleled networking opportunity for participants from nearly every warfare community across the Sea Services and from industry. Under the guidance of Professor Michael Meyer from the University of California’s Rady School of Management, participants completed a crash course in “Design Thinking”—using brainstorming and analysis sessions to break apart the problems and identify solutions. At the conclusion of Day Two, facilitators selected a representative from each team to brief Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps General Christopher Mahoney.
General Mahoney received the briefs and spent about 30 minutes in conversation with the entire DARE team. Following a robust back-and-forth, he acknowledged and commended the team for coming up with recommendations that would not require additional resources, making it easier for their recommendations to take form.
As the risk of conflict in the maritime domain increases, the state of the Sea Services becomes more significant for both the American people and military service members. The DARE Innovation Workshop is a remarkable mechanism that enables junior and midcareer professionals to address servicewide problems and report back directly to Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard service chiefs.
