Military Attrition

The military services all survey enlistees on their attitude toward military service and quality of life, but they have not used this information to analyze why significant numbers of new recruits are being discharged--nearly 32 percent fail to complete their four-year terms--or to develop policies to reduce the problem. Such attrition is costly. The Defense Department estimates that it spent an average of about $35,500 to recruit and train each enlistee during the first term. GAO calculates that the military spent $1.3 billion on the 72,670 enlistees who entered the services in fiscal year 1993 and left prematurely. Official reasons for separation of enlistees who entered the services in fiscal year 1993 varied by gender and service. For example, higher percentages of enlisted men than women were separated for misconduct, drugs, and alcoholism. The leading reason given for female attrition was pregnancy, and higher percentages of enlisted women were separated for medical conditions, performance problems, and parenthood.

GAO noted that: (1) first-term attrition has been a long-standing and complex problem for the services; (2) while all four services are concerned about attrition, they have made few formal policy changes aimed at reducing attrition in specific target populations; (3) although the services collect survey data to assess attitudes about military service and quality of life, they do not use this data to analyze why separations are occurring or to formulate policy changes or actions aimed at reducing early attrition; (4) between fiscal year (FY) 1982 through FY 1993, 31.7 percent of all enlistees did not complete their first terms of service; (5) for Army, Navy, and Air Force enlistees who entered the services in FY 1993, attrition rates were higher than they had been in over a decade; (6) DOD's data on attrition does not include all enlistees allowed to separate early from the military; (7) using the FY 1993 cost estimates, GAO calculates that the services spent $1.3 billion on the 72,670 enlistees who entered the services in FY 1993 and departed prematurely; (8) because these enlistees were separated early, the services did not get a full return on their investment; (9) official reasons for the separation of enlistees who entered the services in FY 1993 varied by gender and service; (10) variances in the types of separations among the services indicate that the services interpret separation codes differently, that their separation policies differ, that the services have very different attrition problems, or some combination of these explanations; (11) in its 1997 report on attrition from basic training, GAO recommended ways for DOD to improve the use of these separation codes to build a more complete database on reasons for servicewide attrition; (12) GAO's recommendations have been incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 1998, and DOD has begun to comply with these legislative requirements; (13) all four services are concerned about attrition, and the Army and the Air Force have set numerical targets for reducing it; (14) GAO found that the services did not always have adequate data on the exact reasons for separation; (15) without such data and formal policy changes, numerical targets will be arbitrary, and success in reducing attrition may either be coincidental or result in the failure to discharge enlistees who really should be separated; and (16) allowing many enlistees to easily separate with honorable discharges may inadvertently serve as a disincentive for them to persevere.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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