OPTIMAL GEOGRAPHIC ALIGNMENT OF U.S. ARMY RECRUITING COMMAND RESOURCES TO REDUCE MISSION RISK
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Authors
Johnson, Garrett S.
Subjects
Army recruiting
U.S. Army Recruiting Command
USAREC
districting
geographic optimization
U.S. Army Recruiting Command
USAREC
districting
geographic optimization
Advisors
Eisenberg, Daniel
Date of Issue
2023-06
Date
Publisher
Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) is comprised of over 7,000 recruiters spread across 1,300 stations with the mission to enlist more than 60,000 young people into the U.S. Army annually. USAREC groups its stations into companies to balance span of control responsibilities and minimize its risk of mission failure. Currently, company enlistments are imbalanced—USAREC relies on a small number of companies to produce an outsized portion of its enlistments, exposing the command to mission failure if a single company fails to meet recruitment goals. The author previously worked on this problem during an assignment in USAREC Market Analysis Division in 2019. We implement a local search algorithm to conduct station-company exchanges and systematically explore station-to-company realignments that reduce this risk. Our algorithm operates on a spatial network of USAREC stations to realign stations to companies while reducing enlistment imbalance and retaining contiguity of company regions. We study new station-company alignments for the entire USAREC command and for each major enlistment region (brigade). Results show that local search can produce station-company alignments that significantly reduce mission risk. However, efficacy of results is limited as new alignments will increase other span of control metrics, namely region compactness and the number of markets per company.
Type
Thesis
Description
Series/Report No
Department
Operations Research (OR)
Organization
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
US Army Recruiting Command
Funder
Format
Citation
Distribution Statement
Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.