Selected Studies

Military personnel who entered service after July 31, 1986, and who are eligible and intend to serve for 20 years must choose between two retirement plans at their 15th year of service. Once the final selection is made, the choice is irrevocable. How should Marines, Sailors, Airmen, and Soldiers decide which option to take? The Department of Defense (DOD) has a website that provides information and examples to help servicemembers. We have used a different approach that many have found useful in evaluating these retirement choices. Here, we update that work for those making the retirement choice in 2013.

The right of the federal government to reuse, modify, reproduce, perform, display, release, and disclose data - particularly computer software - has become an important topic in contract negotiations. We describe the valuation methods used by DOD and industry to estimate software development costs and to assign value to data rights licenses that are broader than the default license described in DFARS. We find that the benefit to DOD arises from the impact of such licenses on future competition and costs. Two things must occur for expanded licenses to be worth the additional cost to DOD: the additional information covered by the license must be transferrable to alternative suppliers, either competing commercial companies or organic DOD facilities. Second, the information covered by the license must be useful to alternative suppliers, to the extent that it actually lowers their production costs.

In this paper, we examine the Selected Reserve (SelRes) affiliation behavior of prior-service (PS) Marines. We use Marine Corps Total Force Structure (MCTFS) data on enlisted Marines and Marine officers who left active duty and transitioned to the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) between October 2001 and September 2011. We estimate the effect of Marine characteristics and service history (active duty and reserve) on the SelRes affiliation decisions.

Military personnel who entered service after July 31, 1986, and who are eligible and intend to serve for 20 years must choose between two retirement plans at their 15th year of service. Once the final selection is made, the choice is irrevocable. The two options are the High-3 retirement plan and the REDUX retirement plan plus a $30,000 bonus paid at the 15th year of service.

The unemployment rate, an oft-cited labor market statistic, is reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for veterans and nonveterans.1 Popular press, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, often compares the veteran unemployment rate with the overall national unemployment rate as a way to characterize the civilian economic prospects of veterans.

Achieving the desired overall force composition in the Navy requires accessing the right mix of recruits—enlisted and officer, active and reserve. To do this, the Navy must have details about the available recruitable population, including where specific types of people are located. The Commander of Navy Recruiting Command (CNRC) asked CNA to help improve the methods and models which currently geographically allocate recruiting goals. NRC uses econometric models to guide to allocate goals for recruiting enlisted personnel, and employs a less rigorous method for officers.

The Marine Corps Fitness Report (FitRep) system provides the official evaluation and record of an officer’s performance. Given the FitRep’s importance in determining fair and equal opportunity for career progression and continuation, it is crucial that the system be reviewed periodically. The Marine Corps implemented the current FitRep system in 1999 to address concerns about grade inflation, and the system has not received a thorough examination since then.

The free flow of oil is critical to world commerce and global economic prosperity. Oil trade requires the use of maritime trade routes, which can span from hundreds to thousands of miles. Hence, oil tankers often travel through straits and canals to reduce transport costs. These passageways—referred to as chokepoints—are narrow channels along the most widely used global sea routes.  This study evaluates how potential disruptions at critical chokepoints could affect the U.S. economy and economies around the world.

How will climate change affect military humanitarian and disaster response operations? Answering this question requires answering a number of other, related, questions. How will climate change affect the frequency, type, and nature of disasters and humanitarian emergencies? How will pressures from climate change affect social and economic factors that determine the security situation at the scene of the response? What types of disasters do US military forces respond to today, and how do they compare with those types of disaster most affected by climate change? Why does the US commit military forces to a disaster response operation? And what unique capabilities do they bring when they arrive?

This annotated briefing analyzes the last 30 years, trying to answer the following questions: Have recruit characteristics changed over time? Have the relationships between recruit characteristics and subsequent attrition remained stable or have the patterns changed? What characteristics are most important for predicting success in the Corps? While most of the focus is on accession characteristics and bootcamp attrition, we also look at first-term attrition and long-term retention.

 

At their 15th year of service, military personnel who are eligible and intend to serve for 20 years must choose either: (1) High-3 retirement plan or (2) A reduced retirement (REDUX) and a $30,000 bonus paid at the 15th year of service. This paper is designed to help servicemembers make that decision.

This manual describes the use and maintenance of the Personnel Inventory Aging and Promotion (PIAP) model and discusses its development, structure, and outputs. Additionally, the manual provides guidance for interpreting the model’s results.