Chapter Seven
Branching and Assignments
The next stage of the personnel life cycle is the selection of the particular career field and related assignments each servicemember fulfills during his or her time in the military. Together, these career field and assignment selections can affect potential promotion opportunities to higher ranks. However, due to both structural and perceptual barriers, there are potential demographic differences in career field preferences and command assignment opportunities that influence the future demographic diversity of senior military leadership. This chapter describes those barriers and how they can be addressed through policy changes.
Career Fields, Key Assignments, and Demographic Diversity As a first step in examining the role played by career fields and assignments in senior military leadership diversity, the Commission explored both the extent to which specific career fields and assignments are related to advancing to senior leadership ranks and the extent to which racial/ethnic minorities and women may be underrepresented in those key career fields and assignments. The Commission used common DMDCprovided AC and RC datasets for these analyses. The data presented in this section are from December 2008 for the AC and June 2010 for the RC. Data on the Coast Guard were not included in the analyses because DMDC personnel data for the Coast Guard were not available.
Enlisted Career Fields Based on recent data, it appears that functional support and administration occupations are most closely aligned with membership in the senior enlisted ranks in the AC. However, racial/ethnic minorities and women were not underrepresented in functional support and administrative occupations and were not overrepresented in occupations that are currently aligned with junior enlisted pay grades, such as services and supplies. Thus, for the enlisted corps, there is no evidence that career fields have played any significant role in the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minorities and women in senior leadership ranks within the AC. Given these results, the Commission did not pursue this line of research for the RC. Officer Career Fields For both the AC and RC officer corps, data indicate that flag/general officers were, in the periods under consideration, disproportionately drawn from tactical/operational 63
