After years of negative recruiting news and headlines, all the military branches managed to eke out wins this year and meet their recruiting goals -- largely aided by new programs and policies that allowed them to sign up recruits who would have been disqualified in previous years.
However, despite the wins this year, between ambitious goals for 2025 and deeper issues relating to Generation Z, the services may not be out of trouble yet.
The story of this year's recruiting successes largely comes down to two broad changes that all the services made in some fashion -- loosening the rules on who could join and increasing the number of recruiters.
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Both the Army and Navy saw success this past year largely as a result of programs that were aimed squarely at allowing otherwise disqualified candidates to still sign up and join the service. While the programs began to be introduced as far back as 2022, this was the first year that the programs in both branches were able to demonstrate their full potential.
The Army, the largest branch of the military, welcomed 55,300 new soldiers, just surpassing its target of 55,000 recruits and barely squeaking by its recruiting goals after two years of failing to meet them.
In 2022, the Army recruited 44,900 active-duty soldiers, far short of its goal of 60,000.
This slow ascent is not attributed to innovative marketing strategies or new recruiting initiatives. Instead, Army planners have shifted their focus to a series of pre-basic training programs designed to address the needs of applicants who would have otherwise been disqualified from enlistment.
The Future Soldier Preparatory Course, introduced as a pilot program in 2022, has emerged as a crucial strategy for alleviating the Army's recruitment challenges. Over the course of 90 days, soldiers are given the opportunity to achieve a qualifying score on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, a test akin to the SAT that determines eligibility for various military roles. Additionally, there is a track for individuals who slightly exceed the Army's body fat standards.
Nearly a quarter of all new Army recruits went through one of those two prep courses.
Similarly, the Navy signed up 40,978 recruits, beating its goal of 40,600 by just over 300 and leading Navy officials to note that this year had the largest number of new contracts in more than 20 years.
Borrowing from the Army, the Navy also stood up its own pre-boot camp classes to help academically and fitness-challenged recruits come up to standards before proceeding with basic training.
Cmdr. Stephanie Turo, the spokeswoman for the Navy's recruiting command, told Military.com in an email that more than 5,000 recruits attended the Navy's prep courses in the past year, with a large majority, 3,451 recruits, going for the academic portion.
Turo also said that the Navy took in 5,982 recruits who were in the lowest score bracket of the ASVAB test.
The policy, announced at the end of 2022, allowed recruits to enter the Navy with low, cumulative test scores as long as they scored within standards on the "line scores" or subjects that relate to occupation-specific topics such as general science, math or mechanical comprehension.
In all, these two programs netted the Navy 11,354 recruits -- just over a quarter of their annual goal -- that they likely wouldn't have otherwise been able to sign up.
Yet within these totals for both the Army and Navy lurks a deeper issue.
In comparing 2024 figures to 2022 -- the last recruiting year before all these programs were rolled out -- the data suggests that neither service has made much headway in recruiting people who meet their standards without any assistance.
Subtracting the total number of prep course recruits from the Army's total yields 42,000 soldiers -- a figure that is smaller than what the Army achieved in 2022 without the program's aid.
Similarly, the Navy, without the help of its prep course and ASVAB tweak, only recruited about 29,600 people -- several thousand people short of its 2022 total of about 33,400 recruits.
This decline suggests that despite heightened attention to the issue, both the Army’s and Navy's ability to connect with Gen Z may not have improved.
Smoothing the Way with Policy Tweaks
Not all of the services resorted to major, new programs like those that the Army and Navy rolled out.
Coming off the worst recruiting environment in decades and missing its goal of roughly 26,000 airmen by about 10% last year, a first since 1999, the Air Force finally managed to turn the tide in 2024 -- albeit barely.
The service aimed to bring in 27,100 non-prior military enlisted active-duty airmen. They surpassed that goal by 39 people.
Much of the credit in hitting the Air Force's enlisted goal was attributed to major reforms to service policies in recent years, ranging from allowing applicants to have a greater percentage of body fat, changing the service's existing hand and neck tattoo policy, and bringing back the enlisted college loan repayment policy.
Allowing up to 26% body fat for men and up to 36% for women allowed for nearly 5,200 recruits across the Air Force, Space Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard to join. Roughly 2,000 recruits were able to join by being accepted but were awaiting a conditional waiver that was likely to be approved.
Additionally, permitting airmen to have appropriate tattoos of certain sizes on the hands and neck brought in 660 new recruits, and bringing back the college repayment brought in 540 new troops.
"It's impressive the team made [its] goal this year," Air Force Recruiting Service Commander Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein boasted last month. "I believe that the recruiting force has operationally postured itself as best as possible to start [fiscal] 2025."
That success trickled down to the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard as well. The service had a goal of 7,200 new Air Force reservists and 9,359 new Air National Guardsmen, and overshot it with 7,351 and 9,729, respectively.
The Navy's recruiting command also said it implemented some smaller policies that are aimed at making the recruiting process smoother and more seamless, which, in turn, means less recruits are turned away for minor issues.
Turo said the sea service stood up a centralized "Recruiting Operations Center" and created an innovation group "to identify and eliminate barriers at speed."
The Navy also overhauled the medical waiver process to reduce the average time potential recruits have to wait for permission to move forward in the process to no more than three days, despite having some sort of issue in their medical record.
The Success of the Little Guys
The military's smallest services -- the Marine Corps, Space Force and Coast Guard -- all saw success in 2024 as well, although their story and challenges were different from their larger service brethren.
The Space Force -- the smallest of all the services and under the Department of the Air Force -- passed its goal of 659 new Guardians, signing up 716 recruits. The Space Force, though, is often in a position of having to turn people away due to its small size.
Meanwhile, the Marine Corps -- along with the small Space Force -- has been one of the only branches to meet its goals consistently amid the recent recruiting crisis. The service again achieved its goals this year, but surpassed some enlistment categories by slim margins.
Including the reserve and prior enlisted components, the Marine Corps brought in 36,286 new Marines, passing its overall goal by 29 people. Last year, the service recruited 351 people over its total goal, a difference made up of mostly prior service reserve accessions, according to 2023's numbers, which were provided to Military.com by the Marine Corps.
Unlike the other services, the Marine Corps has not made any significant changes to its enlistment standards or policies to help civilians more easily try and earn the title of Marine.
"The Marine Corps benefits from tougher standards in that there might be individuals who are interested in joining the military, and they may want to join the Marine Corps, but they don't meet the Marine Corps standards," Katherine Kuzminski, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank who specializes in military recruiting, said in a recent Military.com interview. "And the question of 'how much over they beat it by' is in some ways irrelevant, because they can be more selective in meeting that number."
Also, 98% of the recruits came from high school graduates, and over two-thirds of those recruited into the service scored in the top three tiers of the ASVAB, officials told Military.com late last month.
"This success is directly attributed to the hard work of our Marine recruiters and Officer Selection Officers working diligently in a competitive and challenging environment," Jim Edwards, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, told Military.com last month of the service passing its 2024 goals.
Uniquely, the Marine Corps also saw success with the number of prior service members it brought in this year through its Prior Service Enlistment Program, or PSEP, Edwards said.
Part of the success for the Marine Corps is that it has the institutional credibility to be selective with the service members it recruits, Kuzminski, the expert who studies military recruitment, told Military.com.
"I don't know that the Marine Corps competes with the other services in the way that they compete with each other," Kuzminski said. "We don't know how many people they turned away, who met the standard and who wanted to join because they were not as competitive as other candidates. Whereas the Army is not in a position to turn people away if they meet all the standards and they're willing to serve."
Coast Guard Finds Success
Finally, the Coast Guard also made its recruiting goals for the first time since 2018, exceeding its active-duty enlisted target by 5% and reserve target by 2% -- an achievement that they attributed to an aggressive recruiting campaign that included opening new recruiting stations and a dedicated talent acquisition force.
The service recruited 4,442 active-duty enlisted personnel and 737 reservists in fiscal 2024, with a goal to bring in 4,200 new active-duty and 725 reserve personnel, respectively.
In 2023, it recruited just 3,126 active-duty members, failing to reach a goal of 4,200. However, it exceeded its reserve target of 650 in 2023 by 18 members.
Capt. Ben Keffer, commander of Coast Guard Recruiting Command, said that investment by the service, including new recruiting stations and emphasis on building a professional recruiting cadre, helped the service across the finish line.
"We have in the service about 370 recruiters right now in the field, and they, along with the support staff that we have here at recruiting command, get all the credit because they are the ones out there doing the hard work of raising awareness of the service," Keffer told Military.com during an interview Wednesday.
