FOUNTAIN, Colo. – The local army recruiting station was empty. The normally reliable recruiting grounds at nearby Walmart were a failure. With the army still thousands of soldiers short of its recruiting target, the station commander, Sgt. First-class James Pulliam, dressed head-to-toe in camouflage, scanned a shopping center parking lot in search of targets.
He saw a young woman get out of a car and put on his best salesman smile.
“Hey, how did you know I’d be here today!” said the sergeant, in an affable Carolina tone, as if greeting an old friend. “I’m going to help you join the army!”
These are difficult times for military recruitment. Almost across the board, the armed forces have been facing serious shortages in employment this year – a shortage of thousands of boarding troops that is on track to be worse than it has been since just after the Vietnam War. It threatens to throw a wrench into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons running short on people.
Covid-19 is part of the problem. Lockdowns during the pandemic have limited recruiters’ ability to bond face-to-face with prospects. And the military’s vaccine mandate has kept some potential troops away.
The current white-hot job market, with many more jobs than people to fill them, is also a factor, as rising civilian wages and benefits make military service less attractive.
But demographic trends in the longer term are also taking their toll. Less than a quarter of young American adults are physically able to enlist and have no disqualifying criminal record, a percentage that has steadily shrunk in recent years. And changing attitudes to military service mean that now only about one in ten young people say they would even consider it.
To try and counter those forces, the military has pushed enlistment bonuses to $50,000, and the “fast ship” is offering cash up to $35,000 for certain recruits who can leave for basic training within 30 days. To broaden the recruitment pool, the service branches have relaxed their restrictions on neck tattoos and other standards. In June, the army even short dropped the claim for a high school diploma, before deciding that was a bad move and withdrawing the change.
The military is the largest of the armed forces and the recruitment shortage is hitting it hardest. By the end of June, it had recruited only about 40 percent of the roughly 57,000 new soldiers it wants in boots by September 30, the end of the fiscal year.
So Sergeant Pulliam, 41, a helicopter mechanic who focused on recruiting five years ago, was looking for anyone to get involved, even if they didn’t already know.
Like many soldiers who make recruitment their profession, he believed in what he was selling because he knew what the military had done for him. Before joining in 2012, he was a 31-year-old warehouse worker in North Carolina, turning extra shifts to support his three children. A year later, he was working on the AH-64 Apaches, his housing and training paid for by the military.
“It changed my whole life,” he said. “And that’s the gift I have to give to other people. You just have to find the people who need it.” He chuckled and added, “That’s not always easy.”
The young woman in the strip mall parking lot was on her way to get a pizza and looked confused as the tall man in green began to tell her about the benefits of serving her country. She eventually politely apologized and said she couldn’t participate, gesturing to an insulin pump strapped to her shorts.
The sergeant made a mental note: diabetes, not fit to serve. But he didn’t give up.
“Okay, well, just give me a name—one number I can call now,” he insisted. “You should know someone who might want to join. One number and I’ll leave you alone.’
Seconds later, he was on the phone with one of the woman’s friends. “She says you want to join the army,” the sergeant said, as if announcing the winning Powerball numbers. “Where you work? I can meet you when you’re ready.”
The sergeant paused, turned and said, “Dude just hung me!”
Moments later, the friend called the woman’s cell phone. Sergeant Pulliam smiled and leaned toward her conspiratorially. “Wouldn’t it be weird if I answered?” he said. “It would be like being a Jedi recruiter. Let me take this one.”
The woman giggled as the sergeant held up her phone and announced that he was ready to give the friend a second chance. The friend hung up again.
The other branches have it no easier. The Navy and the Marine Corps will not release recruitment figures before the end of the fiscal year, a spokesman said, but both have acknowledged that it will be difficult for them to meet quotas this year.
Even the Air Force, which has rarely had trouble attracting talent in the past, has about 4,000 less recruits than the level normally reached in the summer.
“The bottom line is we’re in a dogfight overnight,” said Major General Edward Thomas Jr., commander of the Air Force’s recruiting service. “We’re getting more and more hopeful that we might just make it to this year’s mission, but it’s uncertain.”
General Thomas said the short-term problem of Covid-19 kept recruiters away from provincial fairs, street festivals and their most productive hunting grounds, high schools. The relationships recruiters were unable to personally cultivate during the early stages of the pandemic, he said, mean there is now a drought of graduates signing on the dotted line.
A humble recruiting bump from spicy ads the service ran before the showings of “Top Gun: Maverick” helped a bit, he said. But the general pointed to greater longer-term concerns about the shrinking group of young Americans who are both able and willing to serve. In recent years, the Pentagon has found that approximately 76 percent of adults ages 17 to 24 are too obese to qualify or have other medical problems or criminal histories that make them ineligible to serve without an exemption.
And what the military calls propensity — the proportion of young adults who would consider serving — has been declining steadily for several years. It stood at 13 percent before the pandemic started, General Thomas said, but is now 9 percent.
“There’s just less trust in the US government and military,” he said.
Of course, it’s never been easy to sustain one of the world’s largest armies entirely with volunteers, and this isn’t the first time in 49 years since the United States. the draft ended that recruitment has failed.
When there are a lot of jobs for civilians, as there are now, the military tries to compete using two tactics: sweeten the deal with signing bonuses, better pay and other temptations, and lower the standards a bit to hire people. that might not otherwise qualify.
The military has also adapted through downsizing. The number of active-duty military personnel is now about half of what it was in the 1980s and is expected to continue to decline.
That makes for smaller, easier-to-achieve quotas, recruiters say, but it also reduces the military’s most trusted advertising resource: its people. Research has repeatedly shown that young adults who know someone who has served — a parent, a coach, a teacher — are more likely to enlist than those who don’t.
That pattern has turned the armed forces into something a family business, and led some communities, many in the Southeast, to provide a disproportionate share of recruits. But even in those kinds of communities, recruiting was difficult this year.
The town of Fountain, a few miles from Fort Carson, is a patchwork of working-class neighborhoods with strong military ties. But the recruiting station here hasn’t met its goals for three months.
On a recent evening, Sergeant Pulliam met six potential recruits in a park for a weekly workout of pushups and situps. The group included three recent high school graduates who had been planning to join for years; a young woman trying to get away from a domestic life she didn’t want to talk about; and a 26-year-old man named Francisco Borja, whose father had served in the military.
mr. Borja had tried to participate before but was rejected due to poor eyesight. He hoped the military would catch him this time.
“I want to do it for my family, my children,” he said. “To improve our lives.”