Assessing the Effects of Individual Augmentation (IA) on Active Component Navy Enlisted and Officer Retention

This report summarizes the results of an analysis of whether individual augmentation (IA) deployment affects retention rates for Navy enlisted personnel and junior officers. The analysis compared retention rates between those personnel who have been deployed via IA to equivalent cohorts of Navy personnel who have not been on an IA deployment. Retention rates were compared in three different ways: aggregate comparisons, comparisons by individual demographic categories, and comparisons based on standard statistical modeling techniques (logistic regression), in order to simultaneously control for all the demographic and other observable characteristics. Overall, the analysis found little evidence that IA deployment is hurting retention rates among those who have experienced one or more IA deployments. In fact, in almost all of the comparisons, the retention rates of those who have had one or more IA deployments were higher than the retention rates of their Navy colleagues who have only been on conventional Navy deployments. The only categories where lower retention rates were definitively identified were for E-3s and E-4s, though the decrease in retention rates was only about one percent.