Masters Thesis "Analysis and Modeling of U.S. Army Recruiting Markets"

Maj Joshua McDonald

Abstract: The United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) is charged with finding, engaging, and ultimately enlisting young Americans for service as Soldiers in the U.S. Army. USAREC must decide how to allocate monthly enlistment goals, by aptitude and education level, across its 38 subordinate recruiting battalions in order to maximize the number of enlistment contracts produced each year. In our research, we model the production of enlistment contracts as a function of recruiting supply and demand factors which vary over the recruiting battalion areas of responsibility. Using county-level data for the period of recruiting year (RY)2010 through RY2013 mapped to recruiting battalion areas, we find that a set of five variables along with categorical indicators for battalions and quarters of the fiscal year accounts for 70%, 74%, and 81% of the variation in contract production for high-aptitude high school seniors, high-aptitude high school graduates and all others, respectively. We find indications that high-aptitude seniors and graduates should be modeled as separate entities, contrary to current procedure. Finally, our models perform consistently well against a validation dataset from RY2014, and we ultimately achieve 530%, 119%, and 170% relative increases in respective correlation coefficients over previous comparable literature.