![]() ![]() But two other sets of factors are interacting in complex ways that make it almost impossible to determine which are having the greatest effect.įirst, the number of young people who are eligible to serve in the military dropped precipitously last year - from an already low figure of 29 percent to a shocking 23 percent - largely due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment is low, which always makes it harder to recruit - and the tight labor market has also forced many companies to increase wages and offer compelling incentives to attract the best talent. For the first time in almost 20 years, American troops are no longer fighting abroad to keep insurgents and terrorists at bay. Why is this happening now? Part of it, no doubt, is that the end of the war in Afghanistan makes military service seem less compelling. Indeed, the Air Force just announced that will likely fail to meet its recruiting goals across all three of its components. To the extent that the sequel helped boost Navy and Air Force enlistments in 2022, their recruiting holes could be even deeper in 2023. A recent analysis showed that the original Top Gun boosted recruiting by 8 percent. Furthermore, Navy and Air Force recruiters took advantage of the release of Top Gun: Maverick, which, like its 1986 predecessor, was the highest-grossing film of the year. Both started with deeper holes in their pool of delayed entry applicants, offered extensive financial bonuses, and took a wide range of other one-time measures - such as the Navy increasing the maximum enlistment age from 39 to 41. But the Navy and the Air Force face greater recruiting headwinds. The Marine Corps may be able to compensate for this problem because its outstanding retention rates last year enabled it to lower its recruiting goal. They all accelerated their delayed entry applicants at the end of the last fiscal year, leaving them with a far shallower pool to draw from this year. The other services barely met their active-duty recruiting goals last year, but it will be harder for them to do so in 2023. That means that the nation’s primary land force could plummet by as much as 7 percent in only two years - at a time when its missions are increasing in Europe and even in the Pacific, where the Army provides many of the critical wartime theater enablers without which the other services cannot function. Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000. And the current fiscal year is likely to be even worse. This shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000. How bad is the recruiting crisis? During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target. strategic position in an increasingly uncertain and dangerous world. military is shrinking, not because of any strategic choices, but simply because there aren’t enough qualified volunteers - and that may have enormous implications for the U.S. Yet a perilous recruiting crisis began just after the United States fully withdrew from Afghanistan last summer, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. ![]() The all-volunteer force may finally have reached its breaking point.ĭuring the first years of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many military experts worried that the constant deployments would “break” the force since they expected that fewer young Americans would volunteer to serve in a wartime military. ![]()
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