Army exceeds active duty recruiting goal after 16,000 complete additional training

About 16,000 recruits who did not initially meet the Army’s enlistment requirements were able to complete the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, essentially three months of additional training to meet requirements before boot camp.

Through this program, the Army exceeded its stated goal of 55,000 joins by 300. There are also 11,000 soldiers benefiting from the Deferred Entry Program, which allows people to join the Army and delay their basic training.

The total for the delayed entry program is more than double the goal, according to Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, who said it “will allow our recruiting efforts for next year to hit the ground running as early as departure “.

The Army was suffering from a recruiting deficit, having missed its stated goal of 65,000 recruits in fiscal 2023 by about 11,000 troops. The year before, it missed the goal by 60,000 by around 15,000.

Since the launch of the Future Soldier Preparatory Course program approximately two years ago, more than 28,000 recruits from all components have graduated, representing a graduation rate above 90 percent, said the brigadier. Gen. Jennifer Walkawicz of the Army Training and Doctrine Command told reporters.

Wormuth was criticized by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) during a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year, during which he questioned whether the military at the time was able to reach its recruitment objective only because it had been lowered compared to previous ones. years.

“It gets better because you throw a dart at the wall and then you draw the target around it,” he said at the April hearing. “Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious, that you’re just trying to once again avoid negative headlines for your failure to meet basic recruiting goals?”

“I don’t focus on the headlines,” Wormuth said. “What I do is do everything I can to help the Army improve its recruiting, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The average enlistment age is increasing and is now 22 years and four months, Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, commander of Army Recruiting Command, told reporters.

He said the increase in the average age of enlistment demonstrates that there is a market for recruiting slightly older people, but also that older people would not be incentivized to enlist for the same reasons .

“That enlistment age just tells us, ‘Hey, there’s another market that we’re not really fully present in.’ » We are in the high school market. It’s growing, but we really want this job market to really grow for older people,” he said. “If we understand, you know, for a high school student, of course you have the GI Bill, you know, we have for college graduates, college loan repayment, but now what about when we look at this market work?

The Army also recently began working with Deloitte to use artificial intelligence to help identify recruits.

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“Instead of what we’ve done in the past is actually take a list of high school students and cold call, you know, 200 or 300 high school students,” Davis added. “This is what we need to move away from. We must expand. And from an innovation perspective, this has been going on for about two months, and a lot of wonderful things are happening.

Military leaders across the services have attributed low recruiting numbers in recent years to a variety of factors, including a growing percentage of people who were age-eligible but did not meet the service’s requirements, a growing lack of understanding between civilians and the military, and the pandemic, which ended its ability to recruit from its main targets, such as high schools.