Modeling Reserve Recruiting Estimates of Enlistments

摘要

As reserve forces have become more important to military operations, reserve recruiting has faced many of the same challenges that have confronted recruiting for the active forces. These include more attractive civilian opportunities and a declining propensity among youth to join the ranks of military service. An additional challenge for the reserves is the shrinking active duty force, from which the reserves draw two-thirds of their members. Despite the growing importance of the reserves, research on reserve recruiting has received much less attention than active duty recruiting. For about two decades, researchers estimated models of active duty recruiting, variously referred to as 'enlistment supply models' or 'aggregate recruiting models.' These models typically examine how labor market factors, demographic factors, and recruiting policies influence enlistment in the active duty. Given the growing importance of reserve recruiting, the Office of the Secretary of Defense asked RAND to assess the feasibility of this type of estimating model for reserve recruiting. In the first portion of this effort, we reviewed trends in reserve recruiting and the civilian factors that influence recruiting, and we recommended updates to the active duty models of enlistment supply based on the reserve recruiting process and these trends. These results are currently unpublished RAND research by M. Rebecca Kilburn, Sheila Nataraj Kirby, C. Christine Fair, and Scott Nafrel. In this monograph, we describe available data and the strategies we used to create models to estimate reserve recruiting, report the results from the models, and discuss the policy implications of the estimates.