Publisher's Synopsis
In the all-volunteer military, pay is one of the most important policy tools for recruiting and retaining personnel. Military pay must be high enough to attract and retain the personnel needed to meet manning requirements, and one measure of pay adequacy is how it compares to the pay of civilians with similar characteristics. In 2002, the Ninth Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation recommended that regular military compensation (RMC) for enlisted personnel be at around the 70th percentile of the earnings of civilian workers with some college and, for officers, at around the 70th percentile of earnings of civilians with four or more years of college.RAND researchers found RMC for enlisted members and officers in 2016 to be at the 84th and 77th percentiles, respectively, averaged over all education levels. RMC was at the 87th percentile for enlisted members with some college and at the 85th for those with associate's degrees. For of
