The Army Is Set to Expand Basic Training, Fueled by New Recruiting Momentum

The Army is set to expand how many new recruits it can send to basic training starting in October, as officials are confident the service is digging out of a recruiting slump it has struggled with for nearly a decade.

Fort Sill in Oklahoma and Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri will get two additional basic training units each -- able to train an additional 4,000 new recruits each year combined, according to the service.

Army officials are increasingly confident they will hit their goal of 55,000 new recruits this year. One service official with direct knowledge told Military.com that projections show the Army may actually exceed that goal.

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That annual goal matches what the service brought in last year, despite a recruiting target of 65,000 in 2023. The Navy and Air Force also missed their recruiting goals, with the Marine Corps and Space Force -- both significantly smaller branches -- hitting their much more modest goals.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, in an interview with The Associated Press, said the service is eyeing future expansions to basic training next year if it can maintain its current recruiting groove.

Much of the service's recruiting woes can be tied to a decreasing number of young Americans qualified to serve amid an obesity epidemic and falling academic performance, which has led to poor performance on the service's entrance exam. The Pentagon has estimated only about 23% of 17- to 24-year-olds are qualified for service.

Aggravating the issue is the Army's struggle with marketing to America's youth, as the service is barred from advertising on the Chinese-owned TikTok social media platform. A recent $11 million deal with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and his troubled football minor league didn't yield a single new recruit, internal Army analysis shows.

The driving force behind the Army digging itself out of its recruiting slump has been the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses established in 2022 and mostly held at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

Those programs allow troops who are outside of the service's body fat or academic standards to be tutored or lose weight to qualify for and move on to basic training. The Army can graduate some 20,000 recruits out of those pre-basic training courses it otherwise would not have been able to recruit -- effectively making up the service's deficit.

A Military.com investigation found that much of the recruiting struggles were gendered -- with a shortfall of male applicants making up much of the problem. Since 2013, the number of women enlisting each year has remained relatively flat, with about 10,000 joining annually.

Meanwhile, male recruiting dropped from 58,000 enlisting in 2013 to 37,700 last year, data from the service shows.

That drop in males enlisting can be attributed to a slew of complex factors, including young men being more likely than younger women to be obese and boys falling behind in grade school compared to girls. Both of those issues are being addressed by the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses as Army planners have had to address societal trends.

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