CHICAGO – Efforts are underway to bring the clerical process of joining the military out of the analogue age by dispensing with questionnaires and paperwork that are largely unchanged since the World Wars.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter visited a military entrance processing station (MEPS) here to witness firsthand the ongoing transition of the centers from pencil-and-paper to tablet and computer.
When recruits choose to join the military, a recruiter sends them to a MEPS, where each is given an initial health and aptitude assessment. Much of the process of collecting biological and personal data on each recruit is done on paper.
The military already has launched a broad campaign to digitize the health records it maintains on active and reserve troops and veterans. Leidos [LDOS], Accenture [ACN] and Cerner [CERN] last year split a $4.3 billion contract for work digitizing military health records.
Paper records are vulnerable to deterioration and fire, are time consuming to fill out and compile and costly to store and maintain. More contracts will be let in the future as the centers and other military offices move from paper to digital record keeping, tablet computing and mobile technologies, according to a senior defense official who did not specify a timeline for calls for work to be broadcast.
After reporting to a MEPS, each recruit’s information is compiled into a folder. A single Navy recruit generates 46 separate physical documents that must be filled out and sent by snail mail to other offices, said Navy Capt. David Kemp, commander of U.S. Military Entrance Processing (MEPS) Command. MEPS peaked at processing 40 million pieces of paper a year and have since reduced the volume by 17.7 million through efforts to digitize records, Kemp said.
A central push of Carter’s Force of the Future initiative is streamlining outdated processes like MEPS by transitioning analogue record keeping and other systems to modern, digital versions. Recruits take at least two tests to gauge skills and intelligence.
The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test has undergone several revisions since its introduction in 1968 but still took about three hours to administer before being computerized. So far, about 98 percent of the testing done on new recruits has been digitized and now takes a little over 90 minutes.
Air Force inductees also take the tailored adaptive personality assessment (TAPAS), which provides insight to what specialties a particular recruit is uniquely suited, like cyber or engineering.
Stephanie Miller, director of military accession policy, said MEPS personnel are beginning to use tablets and other handheld computing devices to gather biometric data on incoming military recruits.
“We recognize our process is outdated,” Miller said during a tour of the MEPS in Chicago. “In the future, the way we perform will be much more efficient.”
Future recruits will provide their biometric data to a MEPS officer, who will enter it into a digital record that should follow a recruit to boot camp, through their career and emerge as a comprehensive medical history for use by the Veterans Administration healthcare system, Miller said.
“Having access to information over their entire career is the main benefit,” she said, calling the new system a “cradle-to-grave positive identification process.”
Digitization also allows recruiting stations to pull information from national pharmaceutical and mental health record databases, she said.