Four bills are pending in Congress to reduce the age at which reservists can begin to receive retirement benefits. This report provides input regarding these proposals and the broader issues surrounding reserve retirement reform. Although it is important to recognize that deferring some portion of compensation can be cost-effective, the results argue in favor of providing compensation on a current rather than a deferred basis.

As the defense burden borne by reserve forces has increased, more attention has been paid to differences between retirement systems for the reserve and active components. This report analyzes the systems, discusses the importance of structuring compensation to enable management flexibility, considers obstacles and how they might be overcome, and provides a quantitative assessment of the reserve retention and cost effects of possible proposals.

Attracting and keeping high-quality personnel has been a challenge for the military services during much of the past decade. In response to growing concerns about military readiness and missed recruiting goals, and recognizing that compensation plays an important part in career decisionmaking, Congress recently approved significant increases in military pay. Many in the defense community expected that these changes would "solve" recent recruiting and manning problems. However, RAND analysis suggests further challenges ahead. The military faces stiffer competition from higher education as more and more young Americans attend college each year. Meanwhile, the financial returns to college education have been on the rise for 20 years or more. These and other factors, outlined in this issue paper, suggest that more must be done if military pay is to remain competitive in the future.

This report investigates the military/civilian pay gap and its implications for capping military pay increases. The pay gap is defined as the percent difference in military versus civilian pay growth as measured from a given starting point. The index currently used for civilian pay growth is the Employment Cost Index (ECI), which reflects pay growth in the civilian labor force at large. The authors instead recommend measuring civilian pay growth for the subset of civilian workers whose composition by age, education, occupation, gender, and race/ethnicity represents that of active duty military personnel. The authors do so via construction of a Defense Employment Cost Index (DECI). They compare pay gaps based on the ECI vs. the DECI, and present DECI-based pay gaps for officer and enlisted personnel by gender and seniority and for occupational and age categories. The authors then consider the implications of these pay gaps for capping military pay.

Discusses the policy options aimed at ameliorating personnel concerns.

This report investigates the military/civilian pay gap and its implications for capping military pay increases. The pay gap is defined as the percent difference in military versus civilian pay growth as measured from a given starting point. The index currently used for civilian pay growth is the Employment Cost Index (ECI), which reflects pay growth in the civilian labor force at large. The authors instead recommend measuring civilian pay growth for the subset of civilian workers whose composition by age, education, occupation, gender, and race/ethnicity represents that of active duty military personnel. The authors do so via construction of a Defense Employment Cost Index (DECI). They compare pay gaps based on the ECI vs. the DECI, and present DECI-based pay gaps for officer and enlisted personnel by gender and seniority and for occupational and age categories. The authors then consider the implications of these pay gaps for capping military pay.

The briefing examines how the pay of enlisted personnel compares to that of their civilian counterparts, how these comparisons have changed over time, how the FY 2000 pay actions affect the comparisons, and how recruiting and retention have fared recently.

The military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the United States' longest military engagements since the Vietnam War and the most severe test of the all-volunteer force, with the possible exception of the Gulf War in 1991. More than 1.5 million service members were deployed between 2002 and 2007, many of them more than once, and the fast pace of deployment has been felt throughout the military. Soldiers and marines have faced a steady cycle of predeployment training and exercises, deployment itself, and postdeployment reassignment and unit regeneration. Service members not on deployment are nonetheless busy planning and supporting military operations, caring for injured service members, and attending to recruiting, training, and other responsibilities at home and abroad. Many service members are married, and deployments have disrupted their family routines and created stress from separation and reintegration. At the same time, the long hours, tension, uncertainty, and violence of deployments have stressed the service members sent to fight. Remarkably, despite the pressures from deployments on service members and their families, reenlistment rates have been stable since 2002. The purpose of this monograph is to enhance understanding of whether deployments affected service members' willingness to stay in the military, as the stress caused by deployments would suggest, and how it was that reenlistment held steady.

This work, the result of a six-year study, sheds light on Russia's role in the global Information Revolution. It examines Russia's increasing reliance on information and communications technologies (IT) to improve its government institutions, modernize business and industry and stimulate economic growth, broaden information access, and enhance the quality of life for Russian people. The author examines Russia's emerging IT sector, how businesses in Russia are seeking to use IT to enhance productivity and profitability, the impact of IT on government, and the course of the Information Revolution in Russian society.