The Current Status Of Military Recruiting And Retention

Recruiting an all-volunteer military is a formidable task. To successfully enlist one eligible recruit, the Army must contact approximately 120 young people. The National Research Council explores the various factors that will determine whether the military can realistically expect to recruit an adequate fighting force-one that will meet its upcoming needs. It also assesses the military's expected manpower needs and projects the numbers of youth who are likely to be available over the next 20 years to meet these needs. With clearly written text and useful graphics, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth offers an overview of important issues for military recruiters, touching on a number of important topics including: sex and race, education and aptitude, physical and moral attributes, and military life and working conditions. In addition, the book looks at how a potential recruit would approach the decision to enlist, considering personal, family, and social values, and the options for other employment or college. Building on the need to increase young Americans' "propensity to enlist," this book offers useful recommendations for increasing educational opportunities while in the service and for developing advertising strategies that include concepts of patriotism and duty to country. Of primary value to military policymakers, recruitment officers, and analysts, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth will also interest social scientists and policy makers interested in youth trends.

This book looks at the U.S. military's ability to maintain the force levels required for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan which rests on recruiting and retaining service members. Some military analysts and policymakers have expressed concern that the ongoing operations could detrimentally affect both recruiting and retention. The proportion of youth who say that they may join the military increased after September 11, 2001, but according to the Department of Defense (DoD) survey of parents and other adults who influence youths' decisions, a majority in 2005 said that they were less likely to recommend military service because of the war in Iraq. In this study, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examines the recruiting and retention rates for enlisted personnel within each of the military components, the factors that may influence enlistment and reenlistment, and the implications of changes in each component's success in recruiting and retaining service members. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

The authors of this report draw on a large body of research on recruiting and examine tools and resources--including recruiters and recruiting management, eligibility criteria, and pay and bonuses--that can help the Army meet recruiting challenges.

"This paper provides a framework for analyzing military enlistment and reenlistment policies and incentives, looking beyond simple enlistee counts to measures which include the effects of differential retention, productivity, and costs. The methodologies used provide a common basis by which disparate measures--increases in enlistments under a set of incentives, bonus elasticities for reenlistments, etc.--can be compared. The statistical nature of these techniques, which are based on the retention function, recognizes the randomness in the attrition and reenlistment behavior of individual enlistees. The methodology is applicable to other fields, such as teaching and occupations requiring lengthy training and/or apprenticeship, where entry is usually only at the most junior level."--Rand abstracts