2003 IMTA Proceedings - International Military Testing Association

Anticipating the Future for First-Tour Soldiers
Tonia S. Heffner and Trueman Tremble
U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences
Alexandria, VA USA
Roy Campbell and Christopher Sager
Human Resources Research Organization
Alexandria, VA USA
As the U.S. Army moves through transformation, the focus is on the impact of current
and future technology changing the nature of war and training preparation. This transformation
will involve development and fielding of Future Combat Systems (FCSs) to achieve full
spectrum dominance through a force that is responsive, deployable, agile, versatile, lethal, and
fully survivable and sustainable under all anticipated future combat conditions. Army leadership
recognizes the critical importance of Soldiers to the effectiveness of transformation. Although
the Army’s Objective Force 2015 White Paper (Department of the Army, 2002) demonstrates
recent thinking regarding the way transformation will impact the individual Soldier and the
personnel system, this work is in its infancy. It is assumed that enlisted soldiers will require
considerably greater personal, social, and technological sophistication, but this assumption has
received limited empirical investigation.
Anticipating the need for solid research on Soldiers in the future, the U. S. Army
Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) initiated research to examine the
future first-term Soldier, New Predictors for Selecting and Assigning Future Force Soldiers
(Select21; Sager, Russell, Campbell, & Ford, 2003). Select21 research focuses on the assumption
that future entry-level Soldiers will require different capabilities than today’s soldiers. The
research seeks to understand what those capabilities might be and to determine if the Army’s
procedures for selecting and assigning new Soldiers to future jobs would benefit from personnel
tests that measure the capabilities not currently assessed as part of the Army’s current
accessioning process. The Army’s selection and classification process now relies on
measurement of cognitive capabilities through the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
(ASVAB). Thus, Select21 basically tests the hypothesis that performance prediction for future
entry-level jobs is increased, over ASVAB scores, by inclusion of knowledges, skills, and the
other personnel attributes (KSAs) measures important to the performance demands of future
jobs.
Fig. 1 shows the overall design of the Select21 project. Most of this research is being
conducted with the support of the Human Relations Research Organization (HumRRO). The
presentations by HumRRO researchers provide more detail on individual aspects of the project.
Here, we discuss research challenges and solutions that together shaped the Select21 design.
Research following from that design has produced a clearer vision of the conditions under which
future Soldiers will perform and that the Select21 research needs to recognize.
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45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003