It has been a tough season for U.S. military recruiters. In June, the Navy issued and then rescinded an order requiring its recruiters to work six days a week. The Air Force lifted a long-standing ban on neck and hand tattoos in March to help more recruits qualify for military service. The Army secretary said more recently that she was contemplating reductions in the service’s size, in part to modernize the force but also to avoid “hollow formations.” The soldier shortage has left Army brass with few alternatives.
The services’ recruiting problems have tangled roots and won’t disappear soon. The percentage of Americans ages 19 through 25 is at a 15-year low, which means the services — and many other employers — are all drawing from the same shrunken pool. The economy clicks along at near-full employment and offers young people who might otherwise go into uniform attractive alternatives and rising wages. Less than a quarter of Americans ages 17 to 24 qualify for service, the Pentagon said, because of poor test scores, criminal records and physical and mental fitness issues; less than 10 percent of possible candidates now say they would even consider military service.
Some of the challenges are cultural. The all-volunteer force, now marking its 50th year, draws a disproportionate share of its recruits from a shrinking number of states and communities; about 80 percent of men and women in uniform already come from military families. “Propensity to serve,” as the military marketers put it, is down across the board; the appeal of military service has waned in the aftermath of punishing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even in places where it was once robust.
These trends mirror the generally fading allure of public service among young people: The nation faces critical shortages of police officers, firefighters and schoolteachers. Military recruiters report they don’t see the numbers at the top of the funnel that they once did — and say it is harder to close the deal when would-be recruits get to the end of the process.
Political skirmishing has made the cultural problem worse. Some Republicans imagine the military has become a training ground for “wokeness” and have broadcast that fear so widely for political gain that it might have repelled some of the candidates the Pentagon would have hoped to attract. Some on the left, meanwhile, fear a U.S. military disproportionately composed of right-wing nationalists. Neither threat, to the extent they exist, is something the military cannot handle. But civilians on both the left and the right deserve blame for demonizing the overwhelming majority of those who provide for the common defense.
Though the recruiting shortfalls will also leave the Navy and Air Force short of their goals this year, they have hit hardest at the Army, the nation’s largest force. But its sheer size — nearly a half-million active-duty troops and an even larger number of National Guard and reserve soldiers — makes the service ripe for restructuring. A force that tilted heavily toward armor, artillery, infantry and aviation at the end of the Vietnam War has in the half-century since become lighter, quicker and oriented more toward Special Operations forces.
But today, the Army has, if anything, too many special warfare units. The war in Ukraine has the service eyeing ways to reorganize some of its combat teams into smaller, more lethal units that make smarter use of advances in drones and other uncrewed systems while investing more in missile defenses. “I would much rather, frankly, see us be leaner and meaner,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told the Aspen Security Forum last week, “than keep force structure that I can’t fully man.”
These are prudent steps for an Army that has never been quick to change. The service is right to consider whether its active-duty strength can be trimmed and its structure improved by greater reliance on technology while turning to reserve units to fill in gaps. Earlier this month, the president okayed the activation of up to 3,000 Army reservists in Europe to do just that.
Much as the Pentagon might hope that increased numbers of young Americans will soon turn up at recruiting centers longing to serve the country, it is usually the professional and educational benefits of military service that persuade recruits to sign up. Those are worth reemphasizing. The Army should also, as the Marines have done for years, place a premium on the time younger officers spend on recruiting while moving up the chain of command. Those moves would help allay the Army’s recruiting problem while the service takes modest steps to right-size its force.
