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The current administration has placed great emphasis on "rebuilding the military." The proposed buildup, which includes initiatives such as increasing the number of USN ships from the present number of 272 to 355, will require more soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. Because of today's insufficient state of recruiting and retention in the military, the Pentagon is presented with a considerable challenge to increase the size of its forces. For the Department of Defense (DoD) to meet the human resource requirements and attract and retain appropriate numbers of personnel, the Pentagon needs to consider making significant and likely controversial changes to its policies on career flexibility, permanent change of station (PCS) moves, and required recruiting standards. A failure to modify these policies will lead mathematically to serious personnel issues owing to the dearth of young people who are willing to join the military, meet the present requirements and qualifications, and plan to remain in the military for a long-term career.
THE PROBLEM
The fiscal year 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (FY18 NDAA) that President Donald J. Trump signed authorized nearly seven hundred billion dollars for DoD.1 The FY18 NDAA is predicated on increasing the size of the military by 25,900 people by October 2019 and by a total of 56,600 by 2023.2 The majority of the increase would consist of active-duty personnel. The numbers were calculated specifically to achieve the intent of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), which in the publicly released Summary calls for moving forward from "a period of strategic atrophy." The Summary NDS expresses concern "that our competitive military advantage has been eroding" and it highlights the need to "build a more lethal force" through a "competitive approach to force development and a consistent, multiyear investment to restore warfighting readiness and field a lethal force. The size of our force matters"3
To meet these recruiting goals, each branch of DoD has been required to implement aggressive policies to reverse a culture of downsizing caused by ten years of fiscal restraint. Despite these changes, DoD has struggled to meet its recruiting metrics and is faced with short- and long-term problematic challenges. In 2018, after realizing that the service could not attain its stated recruiting goal of eighty thousand troops (a 16 percent increase...