13.6 Across Defence there should be greater emphasis on recruiting and developing people with the right skills and expertise, particularly in professional or more specialist functional areas such as commerce, infrastructure, acquisition, finance and HR. Additionally, more deliberate steps are needed to develop the senior leadership with the professional skills required to exercise the responsibilities envisaged for the top posts in the new model. Defence should also move towards a system that, as a principle, allows individuals to stay in key posts for longer than they tend to at present. This would allow them to bring their expertise to bear, enhance continuity and a corporate perspective, and make it easier for them to be held to account for their decisions and performance. Of course, given the range of appointments in an organisation as large and complex as Defence, the need to develop individuals' skills through different postings and to meet the expectations of military and civilian staff, the system will still need to be sufficiently flexible and pragmatic. Specifically, we judge that:
• standard tenures for the most senior posts should, as a guide, be increased from 2 to 3 years to 4 to 5 years;
• 2 to 3 years continues to be the optimum length of tenure for operational command appointments (for example of ships, units and air stations);
• tenures at OF5 / Band B and above should reflect the fact that the military, and to a lesser extent the Civil Service, are bottom-fed organisations. The top talent and those in very high tempo posts should continue to serve for 2 to 3 years to ensure a breadth of experience or to avoid burnout, but the majority should follow a more deliberate and increasingly specialised progression, with tour lengths aligned with the key outputs of the post (for example, key milestones in an equipment project); and,
• the Department should manage senior individuals' performance robustly and must be willing to replace those whose performance falls short.
• Senior military career management
13.7 The way the careers of senior military and civilian personnel are managed, and them incentives that creates, is key to ensuring the right behaviours and quality of individuals in key posts. We concluded that, whilst the existing, single-Service led military processes do need to be refined, they are not fundamentally flawed. We looked carefully at the argument that single Service loyalties and influences can outweigh the interests of Defence as a whole, which is particularly important in joint or corporate posts, and at senior levels. We found concrete evidence of this quite difficult to come by, partly because motivations among the military reflect a range of influences, both from their single Service and from the joint operations and training and education that has been the norm over the last generation. This perception may also be a symptom of the current model, where the single Services do not have all the levers they need to deliver the military capability for which they are held responsible and accountable.
13.8 However, given the increasingly integrated and joint environment in which Defence is undertaken, it is important that single Service views are balanced by a joint perspective. This is reflected in our proposals in Part 9 to form a JFC, which we hope will, among other benefits, further develop joint behaviours across the Armed Forces and champion joint capabilities and the people operating in joint posts. Our conclusions on the management of our senior people also reflect this trend.