After years of concern about declining enrollment and eroding standards, a promising turn around by all of the services. Greater opportunities, even in a tight labor market, are being recognized. An important and promising development for the country. T

The Cipher Brief

Assessing US Recruitment: The Military V. Pete Hegseth

Posted: November 19th, 2024

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978. 

OPINION — “The U.S. Army Recruiting Command exceeded our fiscal year 2024 recruiting mission, with more than 55,000 future soldiers going to basic combat training. Additionally, our dedicated recruiters capitalized on this momentum and surpassed the fiscal year ’24 delayed entry program mission of 5,000, contracting more than 11,000 future enlistments for fiscal year ’25. This is a great start and a very positive momentum. Achieving these goals helps ensure our Army has the personnel needed to meet end strength numbers established by Congress.”

That was Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, commanding general, United States Army Recruiting Command, speaking at the Pentagon Oct. 30, during the 2024-2025 Recruiting Issues Media Roundtable.

Looking to the future, Gen. Davis said, “Our recruiting staff and innovation team have been hard at work to transform the enterprise’s prospecting efforts and adapt to market expansion. We continue to look beyond the high school market, and in fiscal year ’24 had an average enlistment age of 22 years and four months, and this is going up. Also, one out of every five enlistees has some college experience or is a college graduate.”

At that same session, Dr. Katie Helland, the Defense Department (DoD) Director of Military Accession Policy said, “The military services concluded fiscal year 2024 in a much-improved position compared to this time last year, despite a continuously challenging and disinterested recruiting market. At the end of September, the services enlisted just shy of 225,000 new recruits in fiscal year 2024. That’s over 25,000 more than fiscal year 2023. Furthermore, the services had a 35 percent increase in contracts written compared to this time last year…and the active components started fiscal year 2025 with a 10 percent larger starting pool or a delayed entry program pool compared to this time last year.”

I am looking at the Military Services’ apparent quick recovery from 2023’s poor enlistment rates and the reasons for it, given that President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee for Defense Secretary, Peter Hegseth, have been openly critical of what they call the Pentagon’s “woke” leadership and the effect of things such as DoD’s diversity programs on recruitment.

Hegseth’s military background

Hegseth, through ROTC at Princeton, was commissioned upon graduation as a second lieutenant in the Army National Guard. As a National Guard officer, he was awarded two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman Badge for his actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he retired from the National Guard in late January 2021, in response to his being ordered to stand down from deployment during Biden inaugural events because he was considered a possible “internal threat,” based on the fact he had tattoos allegedly associated with the Proud Boys.

A Fox weekend anchor and on-air commentator on military affairs, Hegseth wrote in his latest book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, published in June, that “America’s white sons and daughters are walking away [from military service], and who can blame them.”

In an interview with Fox Digital on July 19, to promote his book, Hegseth went further saying, “Well, the choice that families have now is, ‘Do I serve or not serve in the military?’ And so you’re seeing this massive dip in recruitment because you’ve got the traditional military families — those with a generational commitment to service — recommending to their kids, ‘Don’t do it. It’s different. The brotherhood isn’t there today, the ethos isn’t there, the training isn’t there — but the ideology is there. And I don’t want you to be a part of that.’”

Apparently, Hegseth was unaware at the time that there had been an upturn in military recruitment, although he was correct that there was a drop-off in military family enlistees.

Family ties

DoD’s Helland said at last month’s Media Roundtable that “young Americans now have fewer direct ties to a family member or a close friend who has served in the military. For example, in 1990, 40 percent of our young adults had a parent who served. That’s down to 15 percent today. In the past, those direct ties were key to conveying the boundless opportunities and experiences that are gained from military service. And without these personal connections, we find fewer young adults are familiar with the benefits of service.”

She also pointed out that “for the first time since this metric has been tracked, the majority of youth have never even considered military service as an option. That is, it’s not even on the radar. This divide has been brought about by a confluence of many factors, including the shrinking military footprint and declining veteran presence across society.”

Another factor, Helland said, is that data showed nearly 77 percent of youth between the ages of 17 and 24 are not qualified for military service without some type of physical or academic waiver. That is up from 2018, when 71 percent of U.S. young people would not have been able to join the military if they wanted to.

Turning the corner – via YouTube and influencers

In 2022, the Army started the Future Soldier Prep course, designed to help young men and women unlock their potential academic and fitness readiness for military service. It has since had a graduation rate over 90 percent in both academic and physical tracks with over 10,000 from the program joining the Army last year.

The Navy has started a similar course, known as Future Sailor Prep. In addition, the Marines, which has almost always reached it recruiting goals, has a delayed entry program in which individual enlistees spend at least 30 days working with their recruiters to get in good physical shape to improve their chances of success at recruit training.

Maj. Gen. William Bowers, commanding general, Marine Corps Recruiting Command, told the Media Roundtable, “While these kids are getting in good shape working with their recruiters, they bring their friends along and 25 percent of our contracts, one out of four, comes from a referral from the delayed entry program. Our Marines love the opportunity to have a delayed entry program to work with their own little squad or platoon of recruits.”

Although Hegseth did not mention these prep programs during his July 19 interview, he did worry that a massive dip in recruitment could lead “to some really bad decisions. There are training shortfalls and a lowering of standards.”

However, the participants in the Media Roundtable were optimistic about the future, based on changes they all have made to professionalize their recruitment corps.

Dr. Helland said, “We also seek to expand the market by reconnecting with young adults and their influencers on the value proposition of service. For instance, the next generation of Americans to serve should know that there has never been a better time for them to choose military service. Youth today seek a larger purpose in their lives and desire jobs where they have greater participation in decision making and can create a direct tangible impact. Military service offers all of this.”

The Army has made recruiting its top priority by adapting its recruiter assessment and selection processes. It has revamped training at the recruiting college and added two weeks to the recruiting course to focus on people and quality of life, Maj. Gen. Davis said. He added, “Our ‘People Week’ brings recruiters and their families virtually together to prepare them for the demands of life away from military installations.”

Air Force Recruiting Service Commander Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein told the Media Roundtable that the Air Force had allocated more than 370 additional recruiting personnel based on manpower studies, and is in the process of rapidly assigning these personnel to sites around the U.S.

Amrhein said, “As we celebrate the [2024] success, we must also turn and focus to the future. Fiscal year 2025 brings with it an increased enlisted recruiting goal of 32,500 for the regular Air Force, and a Space Force increase by 30 percent. Additionally, Air Force Reserve requirements will also increase from 7,200 to 7,600. Achieving these goals depends on our ongoing commitment to investing in both our recruiters and the resources they need to succeed.”

The Navy has increased its number of recruiters by approximately 800, Rear Admiral James Waters III, Commander, Navy Recruiting Command, told the Media Roundtable, and at the same time removed bureaucratic barriers to rapid decision making and contracting.

“When we take care of our recruiters,” Waters said, “they take care of the mission. Because we recognize that today’s recruits are engaging online more than ever, we ramped up our presence on social media, expanded our e-sports [online gaming] efforts and employed creative talent in our award-winning Sailor Verses YouTube series.”

The Army and Air Force are increasing their goals for 2025; the Navy is at the same level; and the Marines are increasing by approximately 1,800.

DoD’s Dr. Helland summed up today’s situation saying, “The military represents one of the most educated organizations in the world across all ranks. We provide our service members with competitive pay packages and benefits such as retirement savings and health care, along with unprecedented opportunities for continued education and training. We offer these things that the young adults today look for when choosing a career, but in many respects they just don’t know it.”

She added, “Too often, the military is falsely seen as an alternative to college or an option of last resort. We are working to reframe this narrative so that Americans understand that military service is a pathway to greater education and career opportunities while defending democracy and the freedoms we hold dear.”

In that July 19, Fox Digital interview, Trump’s Defense Secretary-nominee Hegseth agreed that “the American military exists to protect our interests and our country and our people first, but it’s done a lot of good in the last century protecting freedom around the world, too, which keeps us safe.”

“But,” he added, “there is no other sort of ‘freedom army,’ so if we lose this one to a generation of social justice, politically correct nonsense — then not only is it difficult to recover, but the biggest fear I have is that it’s open to political manipulation.” 

It remains to be seen what will happen to the services and their recruiting efforts, as we learn more about what President-elect Trump and Pete Hegseth have in mind.

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/assessing-us-recruitment-the-military-v-pete-hegseth