ABSTRACT
To achieve personnel readiness, the military must access, retain, motivate, assign, promote and eventually separate personnel in the numbers and of the quality necessary to meet workforce needs. We focus on achieving readiness in the context of a volunteer force since even countries that rely on conscription must induce their career forces to volunteer to stay, and we focus on two key elements of readiness, recruiting and retention. We discuss some of the studies of the determinants of recruitment and retention, focusing both on policy levers, such as pay, and on the effects of deployments and recent operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We conclude with some broad lessons for recruiting and retention to sustain a volunteer force.
