In a bold move underscoring its need to fill the ranks, the Army has announced a target of 61,000 active-duty enlistments for fiscal 2025, which started on Oct. 1. The ambitious goal comes on the heels of a year in which the service barely met its recruitment objective.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth unveiled the new target Monday during a ceremony at the Association of the United States Army, or AUSA, convention in Washington, D.C., asserting confidence in the service's ability to meet the higher benchmark. "This goal is ambitious, but we believe it is achievable," Wormuth said.
In the previous fiscal year, the Army recruited 55,300 active-duty soldiers, narrowly surpassing its goal of 55,000. This incremental success highlights the ongoing struggles the military faces in attracting new talent amid a competitive job market and shifting societal attitudes toward military service.
The Army's recruiting challenges are mainly the difficulty of marketing to Generation Z and a dwindling pool of qualified candidates in the country. Pentagon officials estimate that fewer than one in four young Americans meet the necessary criteria for military service due to pervasive obesity and declining academic performance on the Army's entrance exam, akin to the SAT, which assesses candidates' eligibility and potential for roles within the service.
This year's marginal success in meeting recruitment targets is largely attributed to the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, designed to assist applicants who fall just short of the Army's body fat and academic standards. The intensive 90-day programs have proven effective since implementation in 2022, with more than 90% of participants successfully meeting the necessary criteria before progressing to basic training. Those soldiers would have otherwise been turned away at the recruiting station before the program.
"For young Americans who had the desire to join the Army but not the test scores, we created
the Future Soldier Prep Course to give them a path to meet our standards," Wormuth said. "These efforts paid off."
The prep courses have also taken up space that has historically been set for basic training -- leaving the Army with a conundrum of filling in the ranks with new potential enlistees via the prep courses, but not having enough space in basic training to immediately send them.
Because of this, the service has some 11,000 enlistees in its delayed entry program -- about twice as much as it usually does each year. Delayed entries are counted toward the following year's recruiting numbers and are typically people who enlist ahead of finishing high school and have to wait for the diploma before shipping to basic training.
Meanwhile, the service has struggled to modernize its marketing apparatus, still largely relying on ads designed with a cable television mindset. The Pentagon is forbidden from spending money advertising on the social media platform TikTok, where Gen Z spends the bulk of its viewing time.
Much of its marketing effort has been geared toward parents and other older influencers in a potential applicant's life, with the service spending millions of dollars for ad space on cable news. The service has also centered its marketing campaign around the resurrected and nostalgic "Be All You Can Be" slogan.
Service leaders do much of their public engagements in media with older audiences, such as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal pitching service. But those efforts are often sporadic, with no significant emphasis on prolonged media campaigns either in the press or advertising blitzes.
"We need to talk to the press and the public about what we are trying to do and why it is important," Wormuth said. "If we do that, real change is possible."
