April
14, 2023
After
more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the U.S. Army is now
officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000
recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the
first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their
objective this time around either. The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the
South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50% of all new members
of the Army, called the recruiting command’s task the hardest since the
all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army’s leaders were alarmed
enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and
related initiatives.
Those
incentives include enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000 and promotions for young
enlistees who successfully bring in new candidates. Women recruits can now wear
their hair in ponytails, and regulations have been updated to permit small,
inconspicuous tattoos in places like the back of your ear.
The
other branches of the military aren’t exactly doing well either. The Marines,
for example, met their numbers largely through retention, not recruitment, and
the Navy was forced to accept recruits who scored in the lowest-qualifying
range on an entrance exam.
The
tempo of recruitment has always swung back and forth, depending in part on
whether the economy is bad or booming. Today, that economy may be a mess, but
hiring is still remarkably robust, leaving high school graduates with more
choices than just the Army or stocking shelves at Walmart (which, by the way,
also offers college tuition assistance).
The
labor market isn’t the only obstacle to filling the ranks. Covid not only kept
recruiters largely out of schools — a traditional hunting ground — for a couple
of years, but they also lowered the scores on military entrance exams. The Army
has seen a 9% decrease in scores (already low when this round of measurement
began) on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the
all-important test that determines which branches of the military and which
jobs you qualify for. An oft-cited statistic — and it’s alarming, no matter how
you feel about the military — is that only about 23% of the Americans the Army
aims to recruit qualify as physically, educationally, and mentally fit to
enlist.
Then
there’s what could be called the patriotic duty gap. The U.S. is no longer
officially fighting any wars (though the global war on terror, even if no
longer known by that name, never really ends). The lack of a
rally-round-the-flag event like 9/11, along with the calamitous military
withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and 20th-anniversary reexaminations of the
disastrous invasion of Iraq, have left Washington wary of starting a new
conflict. Sure, tens of billions of dollars of weaponry are going to Ukraine
and there are more than 900 U.S. troops still in fighting mode in Syria, where
a drone strike recently killed an American contractor and injured U.S. troops,
but we seldom hear much about such deployments, or similar ones in Iraq, Niger,
Somalia, and other countries across much of Africa, until something goes wrong,
so they’re hardly top-notch recruitment material.
Summing
up the mood of the military’s present target generation, Major General Alex
Fink, chief of Army enterprise marketing, observed, “They see us as revered,
but not relevant in their lives.”
What’s
a Recruiter To Do?
A
year ago, an Army Career Center (aka a recruiting station) opened in my fairly
affluent neighborhood. This was curious. After all, it’s an area surrounded by
elite universities and not the most welcoming high schools when it comes to the
military. I had walked by the station often, noting the posters in its windows
advertising career training and the benefits of the Army Reserve. There was
even one in Tagalog about an expedited path to U.S. citizenship. (And mind you,
there isn’t a large Filipino population in this neighborhood either.)
Finally,
as someone who’s worked for years with antiwar GIs and wrote the book War Is
Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, I decided to
drop in for a chat, only to hesitate, anticipating suspicion, if not outright
hostility.
Boy,
was I wrong! The four noncommissioned officers stationed there, only one of
whom had spent extended time in a war zone, couldn’t have been more eager to
talk about the benefits of Army life. Their spiel was good, too: career
training, college tuition, some control over the first duty station you’re
likely to get, housing, health care, family benefits, competitive pay, even
bonuses, not to speak of 30 days off each year and substantial responsibility
at a young age. Admittedly, the tuition reimbursement offered wouldn’t faintly
cover any of the universities near where I live and it takes a while for your
salary to amount to much… still, it was an impressive pitch.
And
they don’t take just anyone, either. Enlistment requirements are similar across
the six branches of the military, except when it comes to age limits. (For the
Army, you have to be between 17 and 35.) You must be a high school graduate or
the equivalent, a citizen or Green Card holder, medically and physically fit,
in good moral standing, and score high enough on the ASVAB entrance exam, which
only about one-third of test-takers now pass. (Full disclosure: I couldn’t do
the sample math questions.)
So,
how’s recruiting going? The Army has about 9,000 recruiters at 1,508 locations
nationwide whose pay and benefits are tied to their success. Each recruiter is
responsible for signing up a minimum of one recruit for each of the 11 months
they’re at work. If this had actually happened, the Army would have coasted to
last year’s goal. (I can do that math.) My neighborhood recruiters, however,
seem to be typical in coming in well under that quota.
A
Necessary Revamp
Somewhere
in our friendly chat, I pointed out that armies exist to go to war. They
countered that, for every infantryman in the U.S. military, there are about 100
support personnel and pointed to wall posters advertising 130 Army career
options. No one seemed inclined to delve any deeper into the subject of future
battlefields.
Surely,
anyone qualified to enlist in the Army should know that such forces exist for
only one significant purpose: to fight wars. And the U.S. military — with its
750 bases around the world and its unending war on terror, while the pressures
between China and this country only continue to escalate — might well find
itself at war again any time. The Army’s website is clear enough on its
mission: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready,
prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of
conflict as part of the joint force.” But curiously enough, on its recruiting
website, the topic of fighting a war doesn’t show up under “reasons to join.”
The system is clearly focused instead on all the remarkably peaceful opportunities
the Army offers its soldiers.
That
emphasis shines forth in the resurrection this spring of the oldie (but
apparently goodie) ad campaign “Be All You Can Be,” which last appeared in
2001. It has now replaced the “What’s Your Warrior” ads, with their video-game
visuals and bass-heavy soundtrack. The new campaign includes short YouTube
videos, where likeably plain-spoken soldiers explain just what they appreciate
about the Army. One features an Army rapper; in another, a woman talks about
finding balance in her Army life, as images of soldiers with weapons and
soldiers with families flash by.
Admittedly,
there have been a few hiccups along the way to this gentler, hipper vision of
that service. Take the two high-profile ads in the new recruitment campaign
that featured actor Jonathan Majors (Antman, Creed III) and were pulled shortly
after their debut when he was arrested on charges of assault, harassment, and
strangulation.
Get
‘Em Early, Get ‘Em Young
Army
recruits tend to come from military families (83% of enlistees by one
reckoning) and hometowns near military bases, where kids grow up around people
in uniform and time in the military becomes part of their worldview. Elsewhere,
the military works remarkably hard to introduce that worldview. High schools
receiving certain kinds of federal funding, for instance, are required to give
recruiters the same access as they do colleges or employers and provide the
military with contact information for all students (unless their parents opt
out).
While
Covid-19 limited recruiters’ access to schools, there were always ways around
that. Take Army J.R.O.T.C., which currently has programs in more than 1,700
high schools, a sizeable portion of them in low-income communities with large
minority populations. (J.R.O.T.C. boasts about this, although a New York Times
exposé on the subject revealed it to be more predatory than laudatory.) The
literature emphasizes that it’s a citizenship and leadership program, not a
recruitment one, and it’s true that only about 21% of Army enlistees attended a
school with such a program. Still, it’s clearly another way that the service
recruits the young. After all, its “cadets” wear their uniforms in school and
are taught military history and marksmanship, among other things.
“Co-curricular activities” include military drills and competitions.
And
there have been problems there, too: among them, a report citing 58 documented
instances of sexual abuse or harassment of students by instructors in all
branches of J.R.O.T.C. between 2018 and 2022. (As with all statistics on sexual
abuse, this is undoubtedly an undercount.)
J.R.O.T.C.
is hardly the only program exposing young students to the military. Young
Marines is a nonprofit education, service, and leadership program dating back
to 1959, which promotes “a healthy, drug-free lifestyle” for kids eight years
old through high school. Its website emphasizes that it isn’t a military
recruitment tool and doesn’t teach combat skills. Nonetheless, “events that
Young Marines may participate in may involve close connection with public
relations aspects of the armed forces.”
Then
there’s Starbase, a Defense Department educational program where students learn
STEM subjects like science and math by interacting with military personnel. Its
primary focus is socio-economically disadvantaged fifth graders. And yes, that
would be 10- and 11-year-olds!
It’s
good when extra resources are available to students and schools. In the end,
though, programs like these conflate good citizenship with militarism.
Too
Little — Or Too Much?
A
recent student of mine, who joined Navy R.O.T.C. to help pay for the college
education she wanted, told me her age group, Gen Z, a key military target,
doesn’t view such future service as beneficial. Her classmates, typically
enough, felt less than positive about her wearing a uniform. Only older people
congratulated her for it.
Three
senior Army leaders reached a similar conclusion when they visited high schools
nationwide recently to learn why enlistment was so dismal. They came away
repeating the usual litany of problems: tight job market, pandemic barriers,
unfitness of America’s youth, resistance from schools, and especially a lack of
public information about the benefits of an Army career.
But
what if the problem isn’t too little information, but too much? Despite
ever-decreasing reportage on military and veterans’ issues, young civilians
seem all too aware of the downsides of enlisting. Gen Zers, who until recently
never lived in a country not openly at war, have gobs of information at their
fingertips: videos, memoirs, movies, novels, along with alarming statistics on
sexual assault and racism in the military and the ongoing health problems of
soldiers, including exposure to toxic waste, rising cancer rates, and post-traumatic
stress disorder. And that’s not even to mention the disproportionate rates of
suicide and homelessness among veterans, not to speak of the direct contact
many young people have had with those who returned home ready to attest to the
grim consequences of more than 20 years of remarkably pointless warfare in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and across all too much of the rest of the planet.
All
of this probably helps explain what the Army found in surveys of 16- to
28-year-olds it conducted last spring and summer. That service described (but
didn’t release) its report on those surveys. According to the Associated Press,
the top three reasons cited for refusing to enlist were “fear of death, worries
about post-traumatic stress disorder, and leaving friends and family.” Young
Americans also made it clear that they didn’t want to put their lives on hold
in the military, while 13% anticipated discrimination against women and
minorities, 10% didn’t trust the military leadership, 57% anticipated emotional
or psychological problems, and nearly half expected physical problems from a
stint in the Army. Despite recent accusations from conservative members of
Congress, only 5% listed the Army being too “woke” as a deterrent, which should
put that issue to bed, but undoubtedly won’t.
Let
me offer a little confession here: I find all of this heartening — not just
that potential recruits don’t want to be killed in war, but that they’re aware
of how dangerous joining the military can be to body and mind. And apparently
the survey didn’t even explore feelings about the possibility that you could be
called on to kill, too. In an op-doc for the New York Times that followed a
group of American soldiers from their swaggering entry into the Iraqi capital
of Baghdad in 2003 to their present-day lives, an off-screen voice asks, “So
what does it do to a generation of young people during these deployments?” The
answer: “They become old. They are old young men.”
If
there’s one thing the Gen Zers I know don’t want, it’s to get old before their
time. (Probably not at their time either, but that’s another story.) So, add
that to the reasons not to enlist.
Early
in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I met Elaine Johnson, a Gold Star Mother from
South Carolina, so outspoken in her opposition to the Iraq War after her son,
Darius Jennings, was killed in Fallujah in 2003 that she reportedly came to be
known in the George W. Bush White House as “the Elaine Johnson problem.”
Antiwar as she was, she also proudly told me, “My baby was a mama’s boy, but the
military turned him into a productive young man.”
So,
yes, the Army can be a place to mature, master a trade, take on responsibility,
and learn lasting lessons about yourself, while often forging lifelong
friendships. All good. But that, of course, can also happen in other types of
organizations that don’t feature weapons and killing, that don’t take you to
hell and back. Just imagine, for a moment, that our government left the
business of losing the wars from hell to history and instead spent, say, half
of the $842 billion being requested for next year’s military budget on [fill in
the blank here with your preferred institutions].
Count
on one thing: we would be in a different world. Maybe this generation of
potential soldiers has already figured that out and will someday make it
happen.
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