Key military personnel aren't in for the long haul

More than half of the military's least replaceable service members are unhappy with military life and plan to leave as soon as they can, according to a new survey released by the General Accounting Office.

GAO administered the survey to approximately 1,000 Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps members to discover how critical service members feel about the overall quality of life in the armed services, and how they think it can be improved.

Only personnel employed in job specialties that are experiencing retention difficulties participated in the survey. These "retention critical specialties" include intelligence analysts, military police, computer programmers and operators, electronics technicians, avionics specialists, and pilots and navigators. As such, the results of the study could not be broadly generalized to military personnel in other occupations and at other installations, GAO said.

Enlisted members were the most dissatisfied- 52 percent said they aren't satisfied with military life and 62 percent said they plan to leave as soon as their current obligation is up, GAO said in the report, "Military Personnel: Perspectives of Surveyed Service Members in Retention Critical Specialties (NSIAD-99-197BR)."

Officers weren't too happy either, the survey found. Almost half said they were dissatisfied while 40 percent said they intend to leave the military when their obligation is up.

Retention has been a top priority at the Defense Department since the early 1990s. Recruitment and retention are identified by GAO and the DoD inspector general in DOD's fiscal 2000 performance plan as among the agency's major management challenges.

While DoD has focused recently on improving basic pay and other forms of monetary compensation, participants in the GAO survey revealed they would rather have better working conditions than more money.

"Improving pay and benefits is an important concern for military personnel," the report said, "but there seems to be a much greater need to address other quality of life issues in the retention of military personnel, including the nature of their work circumstances."

Service members who responded to the survey said they were dissatisfied with such factors as frequent deployments, lack of equipment and materials and understaffed units.

Officers listed availability of needed equipment, parts and materials as first among the factors they were dissatisfied with. Next was medical care for dependents, then level of unit staffing followed by retirement pay. Also in the top ten were frequency of deployments, ability to spend time with friends and family and lack of personal time.

DoD officials said the survey confirmed their view that no single factor determines an individual's decision on whether to stay in or leave service, but disagreed that work circumstances deserve special attention. Rather, Pentagon experts said, a holistic approach is more effective than focusing on any one aspect of quality of life. The DoD Quality of Life Executive Committee works on a range of issues, including pay, the pace of deployments, housing, education and family communication.

But GAO defended the study, saying, "while we recognize this [holistic] strategy and the themes it emphasizes, we believe that work circumstances are central to quality of life for the military personnel we surveyed and warrant attention."