Improving recruit distribution decisions in the US Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps (USMC) accomplishes its mission “to put the right Marine in the right place at the right time with the right skills and quality of life” in various ways. One of these is a recruit distribution modeling and information system that assigns new recruits to entry-level schools, thereby determining the entire career paths. This article proposes improvements to the existing Marine Corps decision processes and information systems for recruit distribution. The proposed system, recruit distribution decision support system, provides intuitive navigation through a hierarchy of switchboards, and promotes data integrity by eliminating manual data entry for data already available in the system. It incorporates four objective measures for understanding the quality of proposed distributions, and allows the user to generate and compare multiple solutions based on the trade-off between these objectives. It is a fully functional working prototype system that was installed into the USMC manpower environment, and demonstrated to provide several improvements over the current technology.