In this paper, we propose a new data-mining-based methodology for military occupational specialty assignment. The proposed methodology consists of two phases, feature selection and man-power assignment. In the first phase, the k-means partitioning algorithm and the optimal variable weighting algorithm are used to determine attribute weights. We address limitations of the optimal variable weighting algorithm and suggest a quadratic programming model that can handle categorical variables and non-contributory trivial variables. In the second phase, we present an integer programming model to deal with a man-power assignment problem. In the model, constraints on demand-supply requirements and training capacity are considered. Moreover, the attribute weights obtained in the first phase for each specialty are used to measure dissimilarity. Results of a computational experiment using real-world data are provided along with some analysis.