All totaled, we imaged just under 200,000 legacy paper personnel records for the branch, which translates to approximately eight million pages. Not only did this eliminate the branch's monthly costs to store paper documents with the state, it takes the branch out of the business of managing physical military records altogether.
Military personnel records are now provided digitally to NARA, which has an established, streamlined process for FOIA request fulfillment. Now, when the family of deceased service members request a personnel file, they have the documents they need in hand faster.
Furthermore, given the natural turnover in the military, the branch doesn't have to wait for someone to be retrained on fulfilling FOIA requests when a subject matter expert leaves or gets promoted. Offloading FOIA request fulfillment to NARA eliminates these turnover challenges.