Three Essays on Obstacles to Improving Demographic Representation in the Armed Forces

Policymakers in the Department of Defense and Congress have expressed a normative goal that all levels of the armed forces ought to represent society, coupled with alarm over whether recruiting and promotion policy can keep up with society's rapidly changing demographics. This dissertation informs manpower policymakers seeking to achieve this goal of social representation by presenting three essays on obstacles to improving demographic representation in the armed forces.;The first essay focuses on the effect of eligibility requirements on the demographic distribution of the population that is able to serve in the Air Force. This essay estimates the race/ethnicity and gender distribution of several populations: (1) the population that is eligible to enlist in the Air Force, (2) the population that meets requirements similar to those met by officers who commission through Reserve Officer Training Corps and Officer Training School, and (3) the population that meets requirements similar to those met by officers commissioning through the US Air Force Academy. Furthermore, this essay incorporates "propensity to serve" as a measure of baseline demographic differences in preferences for military service. In each case, the eligibility benchmark contains a smaller percentage of minority youths than the general US population. This result is primarily driven by education and aptitude requirements, and for officer benchmarks, citizenship requirements. The eligible population tends to contain a high percentage of white females, which in some cases approaches a majority. Preferences for military service tend to work in favor of minority representation and against female representation.;The second essay focuses on Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC, i.e. occupation) assignment at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Historically, Air Force personnel policies have demonstrated a preference for rated (i.e. flying) AFSCs by giving officers assigned to these AFSCs better promotion prospects. If these policies continue, the demographics of future senior leaders will tend to reflect the demographics of cadets who enter into these particular AFSCs. This essay summarizes demographic differences in AFSC assignments for the USAFA classes of 2004--2009 and models the assignments with probit regression and a two-sided logit methodology. The Air Force Academy ranks cadets according to performance and classifies cadets into AFSCs such that higher-performing cadets are more likely to receive their most-preferred AFSCs. The two-sided logit methodology analyzes preferences for AFSCs in multinomial logit fashion, while allowing the available choices to vary according to a cadet's performance ranking. Findings indicate that female cadets, and to a lesser degree minority cadets, are less likely than male and non-minority cadets to enter rated AFSCs. While differences in performance, medical qualification, human capital, family considerations, and background can account for some of this tendency, even female and minority cadets with characteristics that are similar to the male and white cadets are less likely to enter the rated sector and more likely to enter the various non-rated sectors of the Air Force.;The third essay performs a parallel analysis on the 2007 Army ROTC branch (occupation) assignments. Because Army ROTC assigns branches to cadets in a way similar to the Air Force Academy's AFSC classification process, this essay also employs the two-sided logit methodology. This analysis finds that female cadets, and to a lesser degree minority cadets, are more likely to be assigned to combat support and combat service support branches, while male and white cadets are more likely to enter the combat arms sector---the sector which promotes more prolifically to the senior levels. Results from the two-sided logit estimation revealed that some of the tendency for female and minority cadets to submit preferences for combat service support branches may have been attributable to the classification process, as lower performing cadets have fewer opportunities to obtain combat arms assignments. The analysis estimated a two-sided logit specification that included several human capital variables. Although these additional variables, themselves, were significantly associated with branch preferences, they explained very little of the correlation between demographics and branch preferences.