CHICAGO — Seven new recruits raised their right hand in Chicago and repeated after Defense Secretary Ash Carter, promising to support and defend the Constitution, as they took their first steps into their military careers.
Carter thanked the families, who lined the walls of the ceremony room with cameras and posed for pictures after the ceremony with the Pentagon’s top civilian. He also thanked the recruits for volunteering to serve and gave them his challenge coin, imploring them “don’t sell it on eBay.”
“The cool thing about this coin, if you ever should get older and go to a bar, anyone in that bar in the U.S. military has to buy you a drink,” Carter said.
Each of those seven recruits, as well as the thousands of others who join the military each year, has a paper file that can be inches thick, depending on the service. That’s what Carter is trying to get rid of in his effort to make the military’s in-processing system 100 percent computerized and paperless as part of his Force of the Future initiative.
A file for a Navy recruit, for example, has 46 different documents. As each recruit ships off, employees at the military entrance processing station where they are sworn in copy the whole file three or four times and send a copy to boot camp and a copy to the services, and then give the recruit his or her own paper copy.
“We’re literally snail-mailing the packet to the services and boot camp,” said Stephanie Miller, the director of military accession policy, who guided Carter on a tour of the Chicago Military Entrance Processing Station on Thursday.
To help reduce the paper trail, recruiters will soon get tablets to collect biometrics from recruits in the field, including fingerprints and a face scan, something that’s done now when recruits arrive at the processing station. This will allow recruiters to send the biometrics directly to MEPS and on to boot camp, as well as cross-reference them with other agencies like the FBI.
Tablets could also help make the military’s aptitude test accessible to more students. The test helps determine the best job for a particular recruit, as well as if he or she even qualifies for military service. The paper version of the test can take three hours, while the online version only takes about 90 minutes.
Many schools have connectivity issues that make using the online version impossible, so students who want to test their military aptitude at school are forced to take the longer test, an even more difficult challenge when teachers are reluctant to give up that time in the classroom. Recruiters with WiFi-enabled tablets, however, could bring the online test with them, officials told Carter.
The reforms are part of Carter’s Force of the Future initiative, which seeks to recruit and retain the best and brightest into the military.
While the personnel changes he’s proposed, like tweaking the up-or-out promotion system and creating more on-ramps to allow mid-career professionals to join the military, have been a priority for Carter, he’s faced some pushback from lawmakers who believe he should be focusing his attention and budgetary resources on the war effort.
But these changes will save money, officials said. By digitizing the process, the department will save on printing and postage costs.
The paper-intensive recruitment process also puts personally identifiable information at risk. Capt. David Kemp, commander of U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command, told the story of one bus of recruits whose bags — and personal records — were stolen off the bus when it stopped at a Golden Corral for dinner.
In addition to speeding up the recruiting process, officials said they are working toward creating an electronic health record that will follow a recruit from day one of MEPS through his or her military career and on to the Veterans Affairs medical centers, where they might receive care after service.
“That’s long overdue, but it’ll be great when it happens,” Carter said.
Miller said the processing command is also leveraging the best practices from fire and police stations, who conduct a similar medical exam on prospective hires. One aspect of their screening that the military will adopt under Force of the Future will allow the military access to pharmaceutical and third-party medical records of recruits. The process now is heavily reliant on self-disclosure, Miller said.
Even while officials are still working to make some of the technology changes Carter is pushing for, they have already made progress in cutting about 17.7 million pieces of paper just by reducing bureaucracy and getting rid of 100 service specific forms, Miller said.
