First, Mr. Chairman, to refer to exhibit J and give a little explanation, the green line represents actual attrition over the three- to four-year period depicted on the graph. The number one category, as shown in the dotted blue line, is voluntary attrition. That's our biggest source of loss. The second-largest category is medical releases. It's not nearly as large, obviously. Then there's a fair amount of structural attrition due to those reaching retirement age. There were a few administrative cases and disciplinary cases as well, but those are the major categories.
Just to put it all in perspective, even at 8% or so, in comparison to other militaries, whether they're our allies or just other in-front military of other industrial nations, this is a very good number. If you flip it around, it's a retention rate of 92% or better. As well, when we benchmark ourselves against other parts of the private sector, it's also a very good rate.
Obviously we're pleased that attrition has come down. We'd like to keep it down. The kinds of things that we've addressed in our campaign plan really reflect what we've learned over the years in doing research with members and, more recently, with members' families. What issues are the major dissatisfiers that influence a member's decision to leave?
More recently, the number one issue has been issues related to work-life balance. It simply reflects both the high level of operational tempo that the forces have been under for several years and also the personnel tempo. As a result of a number of studies done in previous years, we've really pushed to re-professionalize the Canadian Forces. That means investing in a lot more training and, more specifically, professional educational programs. That all takes time out of a soldier's or officer's day and takes away time that otherwise might be spent with family. So that's an issue that adds to personnel tempo.
Mobility requirements are one of the other issues that force people to consider whether or not they should stay or leave, particularly in the later stages of a career when you have deep community attachments or kids who are in school, as I alluded to previously.
On the kinds of things we're doing particularly in those areas, when we were briefing the Chief of the Defence Staff and the senior leaders of the army, navy, and air force about a year ago, I said, perhaps presumptively, that to resolve the personnel tempo issue there are really only two things you can do.
One is that you can reduce it by stopping operations for a period of time. I think the chief of land staff talked about an operational pause post-Afghanistan, not for long, but just some time for the army to recuperate. Alternatively, you can increase the effective strength significantly in a very short period of time, and that's just not doable.
So the only thing we can really do there is try to mitigate the effects of the personnel tempo or operational tempo and ensure that commanders comply as much as possible with the policy we have in place, which essentially requires the mandatory respite period on return from operations and also a period in which they're exempt for up to a year from being redeployed without special waivers or otherwise being sent away on lengthy professional development courses. That's one area.
With respect to mobility, as I mentioned earlier, that's a little more difficult to deal with. We are looking at developing career employment models that would be more regionally based and would give people more geographical stability. We think this is more important particularly for the senior people rather than the junior people, who may not have developed those deeper community attachments in the early stages of their career.
Then, in the other areas, we are looking, as the general mentioned, at a number of programs that would improve the lives of families and mitigate the stress that the military lifestyle exposes them to. We're looking at pilot programs with respect to child care, at how we facilitate access to health care, and at what can we do to improve the opportunities of spouses and partners in terms of reacquiring meaningful employment when they move from one location to another.
That's just a sample. There are six major lines of operation, a couple of them focused at the early stages of the career, but there are some 44 initiatives there that are intended to address those issues. Now, you could say, “Look at the percentage you've achieved now, with 7.9% overall and 5.1% voluntary, so why don't you just declare victory?”
Well, to some extent we've benefited from the economic downturn. If you look at exhibit J, the red arrow is pointing to September 2008, which was the beginning of the economic downturn. So there's a very close relationship here. The really big lever in influencing our ability to recruit, to some extent, but more importantly to retain people, is what's going on in the external economy.
So if, as the Conference Board of Canada suggests, we might see a return to a competitive labour market as early as 2011, we have to make sure when that happens that we have done something to address current and ongoing dissatisfaction of military life.
To put that in perspective, when we do surveys on how members feel about military life, they are overwhelmingly positive about their experiences. They feel they're well supported. There's always a minority who don't feel that way. Even some of the surveys we've done with spouses and partners of members have shown that they're very supportive of their spouses and the members' military careers.
So we have some fairly good indicators that we're doing a lot of things right, but as the general and others have said, there's always room for improvement.