Research for sea duty

We examine the relationship between sea duty and first-term reenlistment decisions from FY95 through FY04. Once we control for other factors, we find that Sailors with 4 and 5-year initial obligations are more likely to reenlist if they are rotating to shore rather than rotating to sea over the entire time period examined. Recently, however, there has been a convergence between these reenlistment rate trends that is not explained by any factors in our model. From FY99 to FY03, Sailors with 6-year initial obligations going to sea duty had higher first-term reenlistment than those going to shore duty even controlling for other factors. For Sailors with 4, 5, or 6-year initial obligations we find that a marginal increase in the amount of time expected to be spent on sea duty in the second term does not have a large negative effect on reenlistment. Finally, we find that increasing deployment spells reduces retention, especially since FY00. While we find that marginal changes in sea duty or deployments will not have large negative retention effects, significant changes may. Thus, we discuss how different compensation tools could be used to address any negative retention effects related to sea duty.

The 9th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation (QRMC) is seeking ways to better structure military compensation to alleviate current recruiting, manning, and retention shortfalls. Structured correctly. Basic pay and special pays should provide incentives to stay in the military, to gain experience and skills valuable to the services, and to move into critical skill areas or jobs where they are most needed. No existing pays fully answer the need to provide incentives to take on jobs that require serving alone, away from home. For this reason, the 9th QRMC is considering the creation of a new pay that would compensate service members for the hardships associated with deployments. The difficulty in creating such a pay, however, is establishing consistent definitions and measures of many of the key concepts related to time away from home. Relevant issues include: identifying the goals of any new deployment pay and the hardships for which people should be compensated; defining deployments and time away; and developing a deployment pay structure. Taken together or separately, these definitional and conceptual issues must be considered when determining the structure or use of a new pay and how it would relate to existing military pays. In a companion paper, we examine in detail the largest "away" pay, sea pay. Here we summarize that paper's conclusions regarding sea pay and examine several of the other special and incentive pays that historically have been used too compensate people for hardships associated with deployments. We then examine the availability of these pays to date and assess the adequacy of these pays in meeting the military 's goals. Finally, we conclude by outlining policy options and recommending compensation changes that would better align existing pays with any newly created pays and with the military's primary goals and objectives.