Predicting 36-Month Attrition in the U.S. Military: A Comparison Across Service Branches

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marrone, James V.

Language:

English

Other Title:

Predicting 36-Month Attrition in the U.S. Military

Place of Publication:

Santa Monica, Calif. RAND Corporation 2020

Summary:

First-term attrition—in which a new enlisted recruit does not complete his or her first contract—is a costly and ongoing issue across all military service branches, costing, on average, thousands of dollars per enlistment and millions of total dollars per year. Past research has shown that attrition is strongly associated with several characteristics of recruits that are observable at the time of recruitment, or at least by the time of accession. Comparison across studies is difficult because different studies focus on different services, use different sets of variables, or use samples from different time periods. The author of this report provides a comparative analysis of the predictors of attrition. The analysis relies on data consisting of all enlisted accessions between fiscal years 2002 and 2013 in the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy, for a total of 2,189,024 accessions from 2,034,045 unique individuals, and shows who accesses, who attrites, when they attrite, and what observable characteristics are associated with attrition at various points during the first 36 months of service. The analysis also documents the predictive power of the data to distinguish attriters from nonattriters to assess the value of recruitment and accession data in developing policies to mitigate attrition. To highlight promising avenues for future research, the author hypothesizes potential mechanisms behind attrition, based on observed similarities and differences across services and over the course of the first term.