Research for promotion

As the U.S. and coalition forces prosecute the Global War on Terrorism and support other contingency operations around the world, the demand for Navy manpower to augment deployed forces from all Services has increased dramatically. These manpower augmentation requirements represent unfunded, unplanned, but necessary allotments of Navy personnel to augment existing units and organizations so that Navy and Combatant Commanders can effectively perform their assigned missions. Active duty Servicemembers who are pulled from their current commands and sent on TAD orders to fill these requirements are known as Individual Augmentees (IAs). With this increased demand has come concern about the Navy’s ability to continue to effectively provide manpower to support these requests. To help the Navy address these concerns, CNA examined two issues. The first was whether Servicemembers with particular characteristics were more likely to be selected for IA assignments. Some characteristics, such as paygrade and occupation, may be explicit requirements of the IA request, while others, such as race/ethnicity and marital status, are not. The second issue was whether IA assignments have affected the career progression of active duty Servicemembers. Of particular interest are the effects on retention, promotion, and sea/shore rotation for active duty enlisted Sailors and officers.

This study answers four questions regarding the need for and feasibility of college-market recruiting for the enlisted Navy: Is it necessary for maintaining force quality? Although college enrollments are predicted to increase over the next 15 years, offsetting increases in the youth population and other trends mean that recruiting college-degree-holders will not be necessary for maintaining force quality. Can it decrease training costs? Currently, college recruits yield no training savings; they cost more per day of training and they do not bypass training at any stage. However, changes to the classification and training systems (such as those described in Sea Warrior) offer the potential for savings. Is it a means to improve force quality? College recruits do have the potential to increase force quality. In particular, 2-year-degree-holders have high AFQT scores, achieve technical ratings, and compare well on continuation measures. High school graduates with some college may also be high-quality recruits. Is it feasible? The Navy compares well with the civilian opportunities of many 2-year-degree-holders and most high school graduates with some college. Since the Navy has yet to significantly penetrate either market, increasing Navy presence in them should be feasible with existing incentives.

The Marine Corps has committed considerable resources to the development of the Total Force Data Warehouse (TFDW). This Oracle-based system allows Marine Corps analysts to look at the force historically and to do very detailed analysis of what it looks like today. A shortfall of the TFDW is that it cannot answer such "street-to-fleet" questions as: what enlisted recruit characteristics are associated with successful adaptation to the Marine Corps; and, what officer characteristics are associated with retention? The purpose of this Street-to-Fleet study was to identify the best historical data that could be found and to build accession-based files, for Marine Corps commissioned officer and enlisted personnel, organized by fiscal year of entry into the Marine Corps. In this volume of the final report, the Marine Corps attrition reasons (MCAR) and Marine Corps attrition interactive database (MCAID) databases for the enlisted personnel are described along with the procedures developed for updating them.