{"id":72114,"date":"2020-05-11T18:52:30","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T18:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/uncategorized\/2020\/05\/11\/what-if-military-recruiting-could-screen-for-wash-outs\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T13:35:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T13:35:47","slug":"what-if-military-recruiting-could-screen-for-wash-outs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/armytimes\/news\/your-army\/2020\/05\/11\/what-if-military-recruiting-could-screen-for-wash-outs\/","title":{"rendered":"What if military recruiting could screen for wash-outs?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It takes tens of thousands of dollars<\/a> to get a new service member through recruiting<\/a> and initial training<\/a>, and costs the services hundreds of millions a year when new troops are discharged from the military before the end of their first contracts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there are some indicators as to the likelihood that someone will drop out, they vary across the individual services and they aren\u2019t always foreseeable before someone has signed up, making early attrition tough to predict. That\u2019s the conclusion of a Pentagon-funded study by Rand Corp.<\/a> released in April, studying first-term attrition across the four DoD services from 2002 to 2013, totalling more than 2 million subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEnsuring force readiness requires the ability to identify recruits who are of sufficiently high quality and who will also fulfill the requirements of their first term of service,\u201d James Marrone, the study\u2019s author, wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A Rand Corp. study used data from the Defense Manpower Data Center to predict first-term attrition in each of four Defense Department services. (Rand)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The cost of these early attritions ranges from about $200 million a year in the Navy to upwards of $400 million in the Army, when the cost of recruiting, enlistment bonuses, pay, housing and training are all figured in, according to the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Past research has shown some common factors in who tends to wash out, Marrone said, but no study had tried to use predictive calculations to verify them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What he found is that while some characteristics \u2015 such as sex, ethnicity, education and marital status \u2015 were somewhat correlated with risk of washing out, the numbers were different across the services and likely had more to do with the events and circumstances of each individual\u2019s service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn terms of differences across services, women are more likely to attrite in the Army than in the other three services; those without a high school diploma or equivalent are most likely to attrite in the Navy,\u201d according to the report. \u201cThese differences highlight the potential importance of institution-specific characteristics, implying that personal characteristics may interact with institutional policy, peer groups, duties, or other aspects of military life and induce different rates of attrition in different services.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n