Research for Officers

Ways to measure the marginal benefits and marginal costs of graduate education to help allocate the Navy's educational resources are explored. A major portion of the analysis deals with the difficult problems that arise in the measurement of the marginal benefits. It also discusses the components and measurement of the marginal cost and concludes with a brief analysis of the way in which the Navy currently allocates its graduate education resources.

This is volume II of a two-volume report on the results of a study concerning alcohol and drug use in the Marine Corps. It contains eight appendixes presenting detailed data and analyses supporting the main text in Volume I. The questionnaire used in the survey is reproduced in appendix A; appendix B describes the survey methodology; appendix C contains tables giving the sizes of the populations and samples surveyed; appendix D addresses the accuracy of the results obtained from the survey; appendix E describes the composite measure, or index, developed for estimating the monthly consumption of alcoholic beverages; appendix F looks at the patterns of responses to the questionnaires and how consistent they were; appendix G contains tables showing the prevalence of alcohol and drug use by unit type, location, and pay grade; and appendix H shows the relationship between urinalysis test results and use of drugs at the time tested.

Over the past several years, the Marine Corps has experienced an increasingly high rate of attrition among its pilots and flight officers. Based on a survey of all active duty and some recently separated pilots and flight officers, this study identifies the issues and attitudes that motivate the career decision. Recommendations are made for reducing attrition.

The Navy currently procures unrestricted line officers through nine sources which differ widely in their costs and returns. In this paper, we construct a linear programming model that solves for the optimal number of accessions from each source. Life-cycle costs are minimized subject to the constraint that, for each URL designation, the required number of officers at each rank is met. The inputs to the model include the present value of costs, the initial distribution of officers across designations, retention, promotion success, and requirements. The study finds that six of the nine officer accession programs consistently enter the optimal accession program mix. The need for individual programs is linked with certain Navy requirements. The study concludes with three recommendations that should reduce Navy manpower costs.