Over the past ten years, maintenance career fields in the U.S. Air Force have been negatively affected by a series of events that have resulted in an experience shortage. Although there has been an improvement in Total Force manning since 2015, several skill levels are still experiencing shortages. To bridge the experience shortfall, the U.S. Government Accountability Office called for an Air Force retention strategy tailored to retain experienced maintainers. The RAND Corporation was asked to explore whether individual characteristics, economic and geographic factors, and the new Blended Retirement System (BRS) could provide additional insights into what predicts retention of this workforce.

This report focuses primarily on aircraft maintenance career fields, with some attention to munitions and logistics career fields as resources permitted. The authors undertake two analytic approaches to examine the underlying determinants of retention. First, they use logistic regression to determine how strongly a variety of individual and environmental characteristics are associated with decisions to reenlist, extend an enlistment, or separate from the Air Force; second, they use RANDs Dynamic Retention Model to estimate how the new BRS will affect maintenance, munitions, and logistics career fields when those in the new system reach retention decision points. The authors find that changes in individual characteristics and environmental variables have improved retention in the maintenance, munitions, and logistics career fields. Although much of what influences retention is beyond the Air Forces control, the authors offer a number of recommendations and identify areas of emphasis that could be exploited.