January 24, 2014

“While all the services, except the Army Reserve, have met or exceeded recruiting goals to date, the department faces a number of significant obstacles in the years ahead,” stated Virginia Penrod, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel Policy in testimony before the House Armed Services Military Personnel Subcommittee.  

The past several years have seen some of the best military recruits in history, as the civilian job market shrank in many places and the services established large, well-funded recruiting teams at the height of the Iraq War.  

But as the U.S. economy gets back on track — unemployment recently fell below 7 percent for the first time in five years — DoD’s recruiting commands are bracing for potential challenges.  

“We recognize this trend will be unsustainable as the economy continues to improve and competition to draw recruits from a small, qualified talent pool, who are alarmingly less inclined to choose military service as a career, increases dramatically,” said Brig. Gen. Gina Grosso, Air Force director of force management policy.  

Grosso and other top Pentagon recruiting officials testified on January 16 to report on the current state of military recruiting.  

The Army is already seeing signs of a preliminary recruiting slowdown.  Last year, the Army had enough people signed up in the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) to fill about half of its annual recruiting goal.  But today the DEP pool is only about one-third full.  

That’s a “canary in the coal mine in terms of warning about a tough environment ahead,” said MG Thomas Seamands, the Army’s director of military personnel management.   

Recruiters’ jobs have become more difficult in recent years as more young people are simply ineligible to serve in the military due to health issues—mainly obesity, but also other problems such as attention deficit disorder. Prospects must also have graduated from high school or earned a GED to enter military service.  

Enthusiasm is slipping among those healthy enough to make the cut.  Internal military research shows that today’s young people are less likely to want to serve in the military compared to past generations.  

Overall interest in the military, known as “propensity to serve” is measured constantly by the Pentagon’s personnel office. Propensity to serve hit a historic low in 2007, at the height of the nation’s pessimism about Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Those propensity indicators have ticked up in recent years, but the long-term trend is worrying some officials.  

“Part of the challenge is…the number of individuals [eligible to serve] is dropping a little bit, but more importantly, the propensity of those individuals is going down,” said Marine MajGen Mark Brilakis, commander of Marine Corps Recruiting Command.  

He told lawmakers that among the 30 million young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24, fewer than 1 million are healthy enough to serve and eager to talk to a recruiter about a military career.  

As a result, Marine recruiters are spending some of their time selling young people on the idea of military service, targeting those who are more difficult to recruit, Brilakis said.  

“The biggest levers that we rely on to bolster recruiting in general are, recruiting marketing, enlistment bonuses, and recruiter manning,” Penrod said.  “The department must continue to provide sufficient funding to sustain a level of awareness and production to meet its mission.”  

Growing recruiting challenges are a reminder to lawmakers that the All-Volunteer Force should not be taken for granted just because there hasn’t been a recruitment issue in recent years.