The entire active duty Army is only 481,000-odd people. As of late June, it had recruited only about 40 percent of the roughly 57,000 new soldiers it wants to put in boots by Sept. The Army is the largest of the armed forces, and the recruiting shortfall is hitting it the hardest. It’s just not a ton of money for signing your life away for 4 years or more (and, really, 8, as everyone should have learned during the Stop Loss days during the high of GWOT). And, while $50,000 sounds like a lot, they were offering me $40,000 to enlist in the Navy’s nuclear program way back in 1983-84. Most of those people have better options than enlistment, including college. Obviously, relatively few recruits are worth $50,000 that figure is for those who qualify for the highest-skill training and take on the longest commitments. 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. To broaden the recruiting pool, the service branches have loosened their restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards. 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 $35,000 for certain recruits who can leave for basic training in 30 days. (The officer corps has been that way for quite a long time.) It’s become very much a family business, even on the enlisted side.

We’ve reached the point where those willing to serve are almost exclusively those whose close family members have already served. The attitudinal problem, though, is far worse. This is especially interesting in light of changing drug laws that have decriminalized marijuana. And shifting attitudes toward military service mean that now only about one in 10 young people say they would even consider it. Less than a quarter 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 we’ve been talking about young Americans being too fat to qualify for military service for pretty much the entire history of this blog-just shy of two decades now.īut longer-term demographic trends are also taking a toll. Since we shifted to an all-volunteer force just shy of fifty years ago,* recruiting has had ebbs and flows depending on the public mood and the civilian economy. So, on the surface, this isn’t all that surprising. 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. And the military’s vaccine mandate has kept some would-be troops away. Lockdowns during the pandemic have limited recruiters’ ability to forge bonds face to face with prospects. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons with too few people to function.Ĭovid-19 is part of the problem. 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. These are tough times for military recruiting. A story that has been circulating in my Facebook circles has bubbled up to the New York Times (“ With Few Able and Fewer Willing, U.S.

Lost soul aside e3