Population Representation in the Military Services-Fiscal Year 2017 Summary Report

Since 1974, the Department of Defense (DOD) has provided this congressionally-mandated annual report on the demographic and service-related characteristics of U.S. military personnel. The Population Representation in the Military Services (PopRep) provides comprehensive, reliable, and consistent data tabulations on military personnel for policy-makers, the media, and the general public.

This summary report highlights recent and historical personnel trends in the DOD services (the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force) and the U.S. Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. It examines both the active component (AC) and the reserve component (RC) of each service. It describes the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of military applicants, accessions, enlisted personnel, and officers, referencing data from the tables in the technical appendixes, as well as from previous PopRep reports.

A primary purpose of this report is to provide an accessible overview of the extensive amount of publicly available information on military personnel. The full selection of FY17 data tables, as well as PopRep reports for FY97 through FY16, can be found at www.cna.org/research/pop-rep. The FY17 technical appendixes (A through E), located on the “Contents” page of the FY17 PopRep website, provide FY17 data on the demographics—including education and aptitude—of new recruits (accessions), enlisted personnel, and officers of the AC and RC, as well as historical data on their selected demographic and service-related characteristics. Except where otherwise noted, data are provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC). This summary document provides summary figures, tables, and descriptions of the data in the appendix tables. In this document, table references starting with letters refer to tables in the technical appendixes (e.g., Table A-1 refers to a table in Appendix A), while table references without letters (e.g., Table 1) refer to tables in the main text of the summary document.

The FY17 summary report differs in organization from prior reports, although much of the content remains unchanged. The summary report now includes a table of contents to help the reader find specific topics and subsections of interest. The main sections are organized as follows: Section I summarizes overall endstrength and accessions for FY17 and gives an overview of the demographic highlights found throughout the rest of the report. Sections II and III have been reorganized to focus specifically on the DOD AC enlisted force and officer corps, respectively. Sections IV and V focus on the DOD RC and U.S. Coast Guard, respectively.