Policymakers in the Department of Defense and Congress have expressed a normative goal that all levels of the armed forces ought to represent society, coupled with alarm over whether recruiting and promotion policy can keep up with society's rapidly changing demographics. This dissertation informs manpower policymakers seeking to achieve this goal of social representation by presenting three essays on obstacles to improving demographic representation in the armed forces. The first essay focuses on the effect of eligibility requirements on the demographic distribution of the population that is able to serve in the Air Force. The second essay focuses on Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC, i.e. occupation) assignment at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Historically, Air Force personnel policies have demonstrated a preference for rated (i.e. flying) AFSCs by giving officers assigned to these AFSCs better promotion prospects. If these policies continue, the demographics of future senior leaders will tend to reflect the demographics of cadets who enter into these particular AFSCs. This essay summarizes demographic differences in AFSC assignments for the USAFA classes of 2004-2009 and models the assignments with probit regression and a two-sided logit methodology. The third essay performs a parallel analysis on the 2007 Army ROTC branch (occupation) assignments. Because Army ROTC assigns branches to cadets in a way similar to the Air Force Academy's AFSC classification process, this essay also employs the two-sided logit methodology.

"This document was submitted as a dissertation in August 2010 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Nelson Lim (Chair), Natalie Crawford, and Greg Ridgeway"--T.p.

Introduction: demographic representation in the armed forces -- Race and ethnicity definitions / First essay: the effect of Air Force requirements on the demographic composition of the eligible population. Introduction -- Applying Air Force requirements to nationally representative data -- Results: eligible enlisted population -- Results: pseudo-eligible officer population -- Preferences for military service and the divergence between the eligible population and accession cohorts -- Policy implications / Second essay: demographic differences in Air Force specialty code classification at the United States Air Force Academy. Introduction -- The USAFA AFSC classification process -- Potential explanations for demographic differences in occupations -- Empirical analysis of USAFA AFSC classification data -- Policy implications / Third essay: demographic differences in Army Reserve Officer Training Corps branch classification. Introduction -- The Army ROTC branching process -- Empirical analysis of Army ROTC classification data -- Conclusion -- Policy implications / Appendix A: population benchmarks -- Appendix B: second essay regression results -- Appendix C: third essay regression results -- Appendix D: the Army ROTC branch for service program.