Army revamps recruiting in face of enlistment shortfalls

The Army fell short of its recruiting goal by about 10,000 people this year, prompting the service to launch major reforms aimed at attracting and signing new soldiers, the Army’s top leaders revealed Tuesday. 

The service hit just 55,000 contracts in fiscal 2023, which ended on Sept. 30 — far short of its target of 65,000 new recruits, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters at the Pentagon.

The service has failed to meet its recruiting goals two fiscal years in a row, resulting in the smallest active-duty force since 1940. The number of active-duty troops has dropped from 485,000 in 2021 to around 452,000.

“We knew, frankly, when we said that that was going to be tough to make,” Wormuth said of the 2023 recruiting goal. “But it was very important that we needed to send a strong signal, both to our recruiting workforce to put the pedal to the metal, and also to show Congress and the public that we were going to push as hard as we can.” 

Wormuth attributed the gap in numbers to “a lot of things happening that are outside of the United States Army’s ability to control,” such as a competitive labor market and a dip in young Americans who are both eligible to join the military and want to. 

“A lot of that is beyond the Army’s ability to singularly change,” she said.  

The U.S. military first implemented an all-volunteer force in 1973 with the end of the draft. In the 50 years since then, however, the labor market and social views of the military have fundamentally changed. Even with higher enlistment bonuses and promises to pay off college debt, most young Americans are uninterested in the armed forces.

That means the Army is struggling to hit recruitment goals even as service planners call for growing the force. The service has not met its contract goals since 2014. 

“One of the things that we have found is that the job market has changed very significantly over the last 20 years — and we have not, frankly,” Wormuth said. “The Army has not changed very much how we approach that job market, while a lot of our competitors in the private sector have.”

In the face of this, Army leaders have turned their attention to “changing what we can control — seizing our own destiny,” with sweeping changes in how the service will identify and recruit talent, according to Wormuth.

That includes looking at a larger share of the youth labor market beyond recent high school graduates, with recruiters expected to now focus more on those who have “more than a high school education,” the Army secretary said.

“The Army actually gets 50 percent of our contracts from high school seniors or high school graduates. But when you look at the broader labor market, only 15 to 20 percent of the labor market is comprised of individuals with just high school education,” Wormuth noted. 

By 2028, service officials hope to get a third of new contracts annually from Americans already out of high school. 

“We’re, of course, going to continue to seek high school graduates,” she added. 

Other efforts to pull in talent include “piloting large-scale career fairs in major population centers,” similar to what private sector companies do, as well as creating a specialized talent acquisition workforce, Wormuth said. 

The Army is also revamping its recruiting command, putting it under a three-star general and adding new “talent acquisition” jobs, giving recruiters additional training.

“Unlike the private sector, we do not have a specialized, permanent recruiting workforce … if we’re going to be successful going forward, we need to change that,” the Army secretary said.

The changes come after Army leaders tasked a study team to review 25 years of data to help diagnose the service’s recruiting issues. 

Several of the changes will take several years to implement, but service leaders hope they will ultimately help the Army attract up to 60,000 new active-duty members per year.