Modeling Air Force Retention with Macroeconomic Indicators

Officer retention has been a longstanding problem for Air Force leadership. Both intuition and previous research suggest economic and demographic factors play important roles in an officers decision to separate from service. Leading economic indicators are nationally reported statistics that tend to be predictive of where the economy is heading. This work targets the research gap of how leading economic indicators explain and predict attrition. Due to the noisy, complex nature of the data, the model had varied success in accurately predicting future attrition rates. As a result of this research, the current models can incorporate these findings to become more targeted and precise. Leadership who make key decisions regarding critically-manned career fields, career-specific retention bonuses, force shaping, consolidation measures, etc. will have higher-quality, better scoped results