Population Representation in the Military Services-Fiscal Year 2018 Summary Report

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

This summary report highlights recent and historical personnel trends in the DOD services (the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force) and the US 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 summary report is to provide an accessible overview of the extensive amount of publicly available information on military personnel. The full selection of fiscal year 2018 (FY18) data tables, as well as PopRep reports for FY97 through FY18, can be found at www.cna.org/research/pop-rep. The FY18 technical appendixes (A through E), located on the “Contents” page of the FY18 PopRep website, provide FY18 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 servicerelated 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 the first table in Appendix A), whereas table references without letters (e.g., Table 1) refer to tables in the main text of this summary document.

The main sections of the summary report are organized as follows: Section I summarize overall endstrength and accessions for FY18 and highlights some relevant demographic trends found throughout the rest of the report. Sections II and III focus specifically on the DOD AC enlisted force and officer corps, respectively. Sections IV and V discuss the DOD RC and US Coast Guard, respectively.