As the U.S. Army’s fiscal year nears its close, the service is experiencing a shocking shortfall in its recruiting targets.
The numbers are grim. At the end of July, the Army had shipped to basic training only two-thirds of the 57,000 new soldiers it had hoped to recruit. The Marine Corps and Air Force are doing a bit better, but the Navy is also struggling to meet its year-end goals. The reserve components are, if anything, in worse shape: Only the Marine Corps Reserve is set to meet its targets, while the Army and Navy Reserve and Army and Air Force National Guards are expected to fall tens of thousands of recruits short.
Even the prestigious military academies are feeling the pinch. West Point recorded a 10 percent decrease in applicants while the Air Force Academy saw a stunning 28-point decline.
There are many fathers to this failure, ranging from a badly timed and more-stringent DoD-implemented medical-screening system to a tight jobs market to ineffective marketing campaigns to — as the services argue were a major cause — pandemic-related restrictions that kept recruiters from making in-person contacts in temporarily closed high schools. Regardless, as the Pentagon scrambles to fill the shortfall, the upshot is that the American reliance on an all-volunteer military is being tested.
The downstream effects are worrisome. Despite a hot war in Europe and a growing threat from a menacing Communist regime in Beijing, the U.S. Army — already half the active-duty size that it was at the end of the Cold War — is reportedly studying ways to cut personnel out of its Brigade Combat Team organizational charts. The Navy, likewise, is planning on cutting more than a thousand sailors from sea service as it struggles to man its ships. The Air Force is short more than a thousand pilots.
How did this situation get FUBAR? Do young Americans no longer want to be all that they can be?
This is both a supply and a demand problem.
Recent research has shown that only about a quarter of young Americans are eligible to serve in the military without a waiver due to fitness, medical, educational, or criminal shortcomings. If that number isn’t alarming enough, the Defense Department reports that less than one in ten young Americans say they’re even willing to consider putting on their nation’s uniform and join its armed forces.
In its scramble to address the crisis, the Army has experimented with easing its tattoo policy and allowing some otherwise-qualified recruits to enlist without a high-school diploma or GED (the Army rescinded this policy after criticism from some quarters). Some experts are calling for a reevaluation of the Army’s “zero tolerance” policy on prior cannabis use and the implementation of standardized waivers under certain conditions to streamline enlistments. And, significantly, the Army is tinkering with the idea of establishing a special training task force at Fort Jackson in South Carolina aimed at working overweight recruits into acceptable Army body-fat standards so that they can begin basic training.
Some or all of these experiments should be implemented. But the services have mostly responded — as government agencies tend to do — by throwing money at the problem, offering bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars to enlist to those who qualify. The numbers can boggle the mind. On Monday, Rear Admiral Lex Walker, the head of the Navy’s Recruiting Command, was quoted in a press release trumpeting up to $115,000 in bonuses and loan forgiveness to certain enlisted veterans who agreed to return to active duty. He pitched the benefits as “a life-altering $115,000, and the opportunity to serve in the world’s finest Navy.”
One could forgive America’s future sailors for focusing on the “life-altering” money factor while glazing over the “opportunity to serve in the world’s finest Navy.”
But that’s just the point, isn’t it?
For several decades, the U.S. military’s recruiting efforts have focused on the financial, educational, and career benefits to joining up. Now, there’s nothing wrong with accurately informing potential recruits about the G.I. Bill’s educational benefit, the promise of a steady paycheck, or TriCare health insurance for dependents. And, yes, bonuses and higher base pay rates have their place in attracting recruits from the civilian labor market. It’s going to take more money to pay for the military we need, and Americans should be prepared to pay it.
Yet this isn’t a money problem; it’s a cultural problem.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed to many young Americans that for nearly a decade the military and its leadership have been vocally focused on public campaigns to tamp down sexual harassment and assault in the ranks, while advocating suicide prevention and anti-racism efforts. These initiatives may be worthy ones, but from a brass-tacks point of view, if Apple, Amazon, or any other American company went around advertising that these companies were singularly focused on eliminating sexual harassment and suicide, would that come off as an enticing place to work to its potential-employee pool?
A free people have their part in this story as well. Many American parents, steeped in a culture of safety-ism, view the military as too dangerous for their kids and have discouraged a stint in the armed forces, let alone a career, while pushing for college-at-all-costs. And too many potential recruits see the military as a faceless bureaucracy and uniformed service as having nothing whatever to do with their life and experience, opting for the easy-for-now path rather than the challenge of military service. Too many college kids remain deadly focused on internships and that first job offer rather than pursuing Officer Candidate School and a commission.
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The good news, if the American people are willing to hear it and demand a new strategy, is that the volunteer military’s best pitch has always been its most timeless one: that uniformed service can be a tremendous adventure; that it can transform a child into a disciplined adult; that it promises enduring bonds of friendship and comradery unavailable in civilian life.
Military service’s greatest virtue, if we care to advertise it, is that it can turn you into a citizen who knows the meaning of duty rather than one merely focused on rights.
The U.S. military is still looking for a few good men. They are still out there, if only we are willing to find them.