With few able, fewer willing, military short on recruits

FOUNTAIN, COLO. » The local Army recruiting station was empty. The normally reliable recruiting grounds at the nearby Walmart were a bust. With the Army still thousands of soldiers short of its recruiting goal, the station commander, Sgt. 1st Class James Pulliam, dressed head to toe in camouflage, scanned a strip mall parking lot for targets.

He spotted a young woman getting out of a car and put on his best salesman smile.

“Hey, how’d you know I was going to be here today!” the sergeant said with an affable Carolina drawl, as if greeting an old friend. “I’m going to help put you in the Army!”

These are tough times for military recruiting. Almost across the board, the armed forces are experiencing large shortfalls in enlistments this year — a deficit of thousands of entry-level troops that is on pace to be worse than any since just after the Vietnam War. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons with too few people to function.

COVID-19 is part of the problem. Lockdowns during the pandemic have limited recruiters’ ability to forge bonds face to face with prospects. And the military’s vaccine mandate has kept some would-be troops away.

The current white-hot labor market, with many more jobs available than people to fill them, is also a factor, as rising civilian wages and benefits make military service less enticing.

But longer-term demographic trends are also taking a toll. Less than onequarter of young American adults are physically fit to enlist and have no disqualifying criminal record, a proportion that has shrunk steadily in recent years. And shifting attitudes toward military service mean that now only about 1 in 10 young people says he would even consider it.

To try to counter those forces, the military has pushed enlistment bonuses as high as $50,000 and is offering “quick ship” cash of up to $10,000 for certain recruits who can leave for basic training in 30 days. To broaden the recruiting pool, the service branches have loosened their restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards. In June, the Army even briefly dropped its requirement for a high school diploma, before deciding that was a bad move and rescinding the change.

The Army is the largest of the armed forces, and the recruiting shortfall is hitting it the hardest.

As of late June, it had recruited only about 40% of the roughly 57,000 new soldiers it wants to put in boots by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

So Pulliam, 41, a helicopter mechanic who turned to recruiting five years ago, was hunting for anyone who might want to join, even if they did not know it yet.