The Quality of Personnel in the Enlisted Ranks

Beth J. Asch, John A. Romley, Mark E. Totten

ResearchPublished Oct 18, 2005

As the armed services transform to develop capabilities to meet a spectrum of uncertain threats, a constant objective will be to ensure the military’s compensation and personnel systems are structured to attract, retain, and promote high-quality personnel. This monograph provides evidence on the military’s ability to meet these goals in the past. We regenerate the quality index for a set of three-digit DoD occupations, and use it to examine whether high-quality personnel are enlisted, retained, and promoted to their early and midcareers, specifically to year of service (YOS) 4, YOS8, and YOS12. We use longitudinal data provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC). Using the quality index, we find that those who complete their first terms, who stay until YOS8 or YOS12, and those who are promoted to higher grades are significantly higher quality. Our conclusions differ from those drawn from traditional measures because our measure, the quality index, is designed to include information about quality that cannot be predicted at entry but is instead revealed on the job.

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Asch, Beth J., John A. Romley, and Mark E. Totten, The Quality of Personnel in the Enlisted Ranks. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG324.html.
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The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The research was conducted in the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center supported by the OSD, the Joint Staff, the unified commands, and the defense agencies.

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