Marine Corps Retention in the Post-9/11 Era: The Effects of Deployment Tempo on Marines With and Without Dependents

The paper focuses on the post-9/11 relationship between deployment tempo and retention, especially on differences in responses for Marines with and with dependents. The main text describes major findings; the statistical work is found in the appendices. We found that, at least for career Marines and officers, high deployment tempo had little negative effect of reenlistment/continuation decisions. In fact, we found that officer retention increased with total days deployed or deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. On the other hand, we found that increases in deployed days lowered reenlistment rates for first-term Marines—particularly those without dependents. First-term Marines without dependents also averaged more deployed days than their counterparts with dependents. We focused mainly on retention in FY04, but we also looked at retention patterns in FY02 an FY03.