Army Surpasses its Goal for Recruiting Active-Duty Soldiers, But Just Barely

The Army says it has hit recruiting goals for this year following a military wide slump, a sign the service may be overcoming the struggle to build up its ranks as it seeks a commanding presence in the Pacific to counter China.

Service officials announced Thursday that the Army enlisted 55,300 new active-duty soldiers, marginally exceeding a goal of 55,000 after falling significantly short on recruits since 2022. The Army also added some 11,000 recruits to its delayed entry program, typically a group of applicants who ship to basic training after high school – which will count towards next year’s recruiting numbers.

"In a very tight labor market, our recruiters have been working incredibly hard for more than two years to tell the Army story effectively, and we are seeing the results of their work," Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said Thursday at a basic training graduation at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

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The U.S. unemployment rate has hit historic lows over the past few years but has recently risen slightly. It currently sits at about 4.2%, or half a percentage point higher than this time last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Historically, military recruiting efforts are beneficiaries of higher unemployment rates and other economic uncertainties.

However, achieving the goal is mostly not attributable to any savvy marketing effort or recruiting tactics. Instead, the most effective measure seemed to be the service's pre-basic training courses, which take applicants who don't make academic or body fat standards and get them into compliance so they can continue on to basic training.

Leaning on Pre-Boot Camp Prep

The Future Soldier Preparatory Course, launched as a pilot program in 2022, has become key to reducing the Army's recruiting woes by meeting young Americans where they are. Soldiers get 90 days either to earn a qualifying score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style test with scores that determine what jobs, if any, an applicant is qualified to perform in the Army. There is also a smaller track for those who are slightly outside the service's body fat standards.

Nearly one-quarter of all Army recruits this year needed at least one of those courses to qualify for basic training.

Only one-third of young Americans are eligible to enlist, according to estimates from the Department of Defense, leaving the Army an extremely small pool of potential applicants to court. Roughly one-quarter of teens are obese, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Test scores have also been falling for years, a trend that was particularly inflamed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many applicants in the academic prep course come from poorly funded public school systems or broken families or they speak English as a second language.

This year, some 8,400 trainees have graduated the academic track, increasing their entrance exam scores by 14 points on average, with a 92% graduation rate, according to service data. Meanwhile, 3,460 applicants have graduated the fitness track, with a graduation rate of 95% and an average weekly body fat loss of 1.25%.

An additional 730 trainees graduated from a program that allows them to do both tracks, with a 90% graduation rate.

Subtracting soldiers who went through the prep course and in previous years would've been disqualified from enlisting, the Army had fewer recruits than in 2022 when it badly missed recruiting goals -- and sparked immediate concern among lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

That year, the service recruited 44,900 active-duty soldiers, far short of its goal of 60,000. This year, the service recruited 42,000 new troops who did not need to go through the prep courses.

Early numbers for the prep courses suggest enormous success, though the Army is studying how those troops compare to their non-prep course counterparts during their first enlistment contracts.

MHS Genesis Burden

The trend of recruiting struggles somewhat follows the implementation of Military Health System Genesis, which became the status quo in 2022. The system can show the military some applicants' mental health and medical histories, which can torpedo the recruiting process. It includes medical records from organizations, including civilian health care providers, that sign up for the Joint Health Information Exchange.

"We've been wanting the capability for a long time," Marshall Smith, a spokesperson for Military Entrance Processing Command, which oversees the medical review process that determines whether someone is eligible to enlist, told Military.com. "But it has changed how we do business. This has functionally doubled our workload."

Previously, applicants self-reported their medical backgrounds and, in some cases, recruiters coached them to exclude minor details. Those minor details can now be viewed in MHS Genesis and can cause gridlock when in-processing hopeful enlistees.

The issues over medical histories can take months to resolve, and sometimes applicants walk away from the process frustrated or find civilian work opportunities.

Before MHS Genesis went online, roughly 30% of applicants needed extra screenings or waivers to join; now, that number has spiked to 70%. The Army and the other services have surged medical staff to in-processing facilities to review candidates faster, which service officials have credited with producing some extra recruits.

In many cases, recruiters report mundane issues that often are resolved -- such as minor injuries from sports years ago, clogging up the enlistment process. In many scenarios, an applicant's history of prescription medications or mental health concerns, such as anxiety or depression, are an immediate red flag and can extend their enlistment process by months, even as such diagnoses have been on the rise in recent years.

Celebrity Promotional Flops

Meanwhile, the Army has been slow to modernize its marketing efforts and has continued to rely heavily on ads built with television in mind, putting significant money into ad space on cable.

But Gen Z, the prime recruiting demographic, has migrated away from traditional television, making it increasingly irrelevant. The Army's difficulty reaching that generation has been aggravated by federal rules that forbid military advertising on TikTok, the social media platform where most young people spend their viewing time.

The service also had two significant flops with celebrity brand ambassadors.

The Army bet big on a relationship with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and his upstart minor league alternative to the NFL, the United Football League. It spent $11 million on an advertising deal with the league, but more importantly, the agreement required Johnson to do a specific number of social media posts on the service's behalf, which he never fully completed. The effort crashed and burned, not yielding a single recruit.

Also, a multimillion-dollar ad campaign featuring Jonathan Majors was pulled after the actor was arrested and later convicted on charges related to assaulting his former girlfriend. Majors was set to star in the new "Be All You Can Be" recruiting ads planned around the NCAA's Final Four in 2023. The service hoped to capitalize on his blockbuster success in recent Marvel movies and "Creed III."

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