US Army recruiting falls 25% short of 2022 target
Armed services find reaching goals tough in strong job market
WASHINGTON — The Army fell about 15,000 soldiers — or 25% — short of its recruitment goal this year, officials confirmed, despite a frantic effort to make up the widely expected gap in a year when all the military services struggled in a tight jobs market to find young people willing and fit to enlist.
While the Army was the only service that didn’t meet its target, all of the others had to dig deep into their pools of delayed-entry applicants, which put them behind as they began the new recruiting year Saturday.
The worsening problem stirs debate about whether America’s fighting force should be restructured or reduced in size if the services can’t recruit enough, and could also put added pressure on the National Guard and Reserve to help meet mission requirements.
According to officials, the Marine Corps, which usually goes into each fiscal year with as much as 50% of its recruiting goal already locked in, has only a bit more than 30%. And the Air Force and the Navy will only have about 10% of their goals as they start the new fiscal year. The Air Force usually has about 25%. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details on the recruiting totals that have not yet been released.
“In the Army’s most challenging recruiting year since the start of the all-volunteer force, we will only achieve 75% of our fiscal year ’22 recruiting goal,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in a statement. “The Army will maintain its readiness and meet all our national security requirements. If recruiting challenges persist, we will draw on the Guard and Reserve to augment activeduty forces, and may need to trim our force structure.”
Officials said the Army brought in about 45,000 soldiers during the fiscal year that ended Friday. The goal was 60,000.
The Air Force, meanwhile, was able to pull enough recruits from its delayed-entry pool to exactly meet its goal to bring in 26,151 recruits.
“Using Air Force lexicon, I would say we’re doing a dead-stick landing as we come into the end of fiscal ’22, and we’re going to need to turn around on the first of October and do an afterburner takeoff,” Maj. Gen. Edward Thomas, head of the Air Force Recruiting Service, said at a conference last month. “We’re going to be starting 2023 in a tougher position than we started 2022.”
Military leaders used increased enlistment bonuses and other programs to try and build their numbers this year, but they say it’s getting more and more difficult to compete with private industry in the tight labor market. And as they look to the future, they worry that if the declining enlistment trends continue, the Pentagon may have to reassess its force requirements and find ways to make the military a more attractive profession to the eroding number of young Americans who can meet
mental and physical requirements for service.
Early this year, military leaders were already braced for a bad recruiting season. The Army, for example, announced several months ago that it would have to adjust the expected size of its total force this year from 476,000 to about 466,000. The large recruiting shortfall was offset a bit by the Army’s ability to exceed its retention goal — keeping 104% of the targeted number of troops in the service.
The causes for the recruiting struggles are many and varied. Two years of the pandemic shut off recruiters’ access to schools, public events, fairs and other youth organizations where they often find prospects. Moving to online recruiting — as in-person meetings closed down — was only marginally successful. And some of the in-person access has been slow to open up again.
At the same time, companies like McDonald’s are now wooing workers with tuition benefits and other increased perks that for years made the military an attractive profession. Military leaders say that they are suffering from the same labor shortage that has restaurants, airlines, shops and other businesses desperately scraping for workers.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that according to estimates, just 23% of young people can meet the military’s fitness, educational and moral requirements — with many disqualified for reasons ranging from medical issues to criminal records and tattoos.
It’s unclear how much the debate over the COVID19 vaccine is playing in the recruiting struggles. So far, the Army has discharged a bit more than 1,700 soldiers for refusing to take the mandated vaccine. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall force size.