A Critical Look at Military Recruitment and Retention Policies

William Lisowski

Expert InsightsPublished 1985

This paper provides a framework for analyzing military enlistment and reenlistment policies and incentives, looking beyond simple enlistee counts to measures which include the effects of differential retention, productivity, and costs. The methodologies used provide a common basis by which disparate measures--increases in enlistments under a set of incentives, bonus elasticities for reenlistments, etc.--can be compared. The statistical nature of these techniques, which are based on the retention function,recognizes the randomness in the attrition and reenlistment behavior of individual enlistees. The methodology is applicable to other fields, such as teaching and occupations requiring lengthy training and/or apprenticeship, where entry is usually only at the most junior level.

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Lisowski, William, A Critical Look at Military Recruitment and Retention Policies. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1985. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7061.html.
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