This book describes a cost/performance trade-off model useful for illustrating the effects of budget decisions on the quality of expected performance in the military enlisted force. The model links recruit quality to job performance on the one hand and personnel costs on the other. Understanding these linkages provides a clear rationale, based on performance and cost differences, for choosing applicants for military service. The book examines trends in the quality of military personnel from the beginning of the All-Volunteer Force in 1974 to the year 2000 and beyond. It discusses technical issues associated with the development of the various components of both cost and performance linkages and presents applications of the fully developed model.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) faces short-term and long-term challenges in selecting and recruiting an enlisted force to meet personnel requirements associated with diverse and changing missions. The DoD has established standards for aptitudes/abilities, medical conditions, and physical fitness to be used in selecting recruits who are most likely to succeed in their jobs and complete the first term of service (generally 36 months). In 1999, the Committee on the Youth Population and Military Recruitment was established by the National Research Council (NRC) in response to a request from the DoD. One focus of the committee's work was to examine trends in the youth population relative to the needs of the military and the standards used to screen applicants to meet these needs. When the committee began its work in 1999, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force had recently experienced recruiting shortfalls. By the early 2000s, all the Services were meeting their goals; however, in the first half of calendar year 2005, both the Army and the Marine Corps experienced recruiting difficulties and, in some months, shortfalls. When recruiting goals are not being met, scientific guidance is needed to inform policy decisions regarding the advisability of lowering standards and the impact of any change on training time and cost, job performance, attrition, and the health of the force. Assessing Fitness for Military Enlistment examines the current physical, medical, and mental health standards for military enlistment in light of (1) trends in the physical condition of the youth population; (2) medical advances for treating certain conditions, as well as knowledge of the typical course of chronic conditions as young people reach adulthood; (3) the role of basic training in physical conditioning; (4) the physical demands and working conditions of various jobs in today's military services; and (5) the measures that are used by the Services to characterize an individual's physical condition. The focus is on the enlistment of 18- to 24-year-olds and their first term of service.

As U.S. military forces appear overcommitted and some ponder a possible return to the draft, the timing is ideal for a review of how the American military transformed itself over the past five decades, from a poorly disciplined force of conscripts and draft-motivated "volunteers" to a force of professionals revered throughout the world. Starting in the early 1960s, this account runs through the current war in Iraq, with alternating chapters on the history of the all-volunteer force and the analytic background that supported decisionmaking. The author participated as an analyst and government policymaker in many of the events covered in this book. His insider status and access offer a behind-the-scenes look at decisionmaking within the Pentagon and White House. The book includes a foreword by former Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird. The accompanying DVD contains more than 1,700 primary-source documents-government memoranda, Presidential memos and letters, staff papers, and reports-linked directly from citations in the electronic version of the book. This unique technology presents a treasure trove of materials for specialists, researchers, and students of military history, public administration, and government affairs to draw upon.

This special issue is based on a workshop which began with a description and examination of the current National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) standard-setting model, then looked to standard-setting applications outside of education. These applications included those that focus on human performance and the adequacy of human performance; in these contexts, raters were asked to focus on the knowledge and skills that underlie competent performance. Researchers also examined applications that focus on the impact of environmental agents on life and the ecology; in these cases, raters began with the knowledge that more (or less) of a substance is better and, as for NAEP, the judgment task was to determine "how good is good enough." They wished to examine parallels in the objectives, empirical grounding, judgmental requirements, and policy tensions for standard setting in NAEP and in other domains. These papers were commissioned to examine the current state of affairs and residual issues with respect to achievement-level setting in NAEP and to help determine whether the models and methods used in other disciplines have useful application to education. It is important to note that the papers represent the authors' views, not necessarily those of the committee or National Research Council. This issue and the workshop discussion point out a number of analogies between the objectives, requisite data, judgment requirements and policy issues for NAEP and other applications. The editors hope that this issue and wide distribution of these papers will prompt others to join in this interesting analysis and debate.

This second edition of the Handbook of Employee Selection has been revised and updated throughout to reflect current thinking on the state of science and practice in employee selection. In this volume, a diverse group of recognized scholars inside and outside the United States balance theory, research, and practice, often taking a global perspective. Divided into eight parts, chapters cover issues associated with measurement, such as validity and reliability, as well as practical concerns around the development of appropriate selection procedures and implementation of selection programs. Several chapters discuss the measurement of various constructs commonly used as predictors, and other chapters confront criterion measures that are used in test validation. Additional sections include chapters that focus on ethical and legal concerns and testing for certain types of jobs (e.g., blue collar jobs). The second edition features a new section on technology and employee selection. The Handbook of Employee Selection, Second Edition provides an indispensable reference for scholars, researchers, graduate students, and professionals in industrial and organizational psychology, human resource management, and related fields.

Simulations are widely used in the military for training personnel, analyzing proposed equipment, and rehearsing missions, and these simulations need realistic models of human behavior. This book draws together a wide variety of theoretical and applied research in human behavior modeling that can be considered for use in those simulations. It covers behavior at the individual, unit, and command level. At the individual soldier level, the topics covered include attention, learning, memory, decisionmaking, perception, situation awareness, and planning. At the unit level, the focus is on command and control. The book provides short-, medium-, and long-term goals for research and development of more realistic models of human behavior.