DoD surveys find recruiters face reluctance among youths to join military

The military services face the toughest recruiting environment in a generation, as the most recent data shows interest in military service at its lowest level in more than 25 years.

Internal Defense Department surveys tracking the opinions of potential recruits — mostly young men ages 16 to 21 — show the inclination toward military service has fallen dramatically since the end of the Cold War, with an exceptionally rapid nosedive since 2004.

A long-term downward trend reversed briefly after Sept. 11, 2001, up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But that bump has disappeared, as young men are less drawn to serve in uniform than at any time since the earliest days of the volunteer force a generation ago.

“You have a big demographic shift happening,” said Peter Singer, head of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “The future is going to hinge to the question of whether our recruiting and personnel systems can make the shifts that are necessary to recruit and retain and inspire this new generation.”

For decades, the Defense Department has tracked youth attitudes by conducting detailed surveys about who wants to enlist and why. The surveys help uniformed recruiters, and the civilian advertising firms who work with them, to effectively identify and win over the best people for the active-duty force.

The critical question on the survey is: “How likely is it that you will be serving in the military in the next few years?” The number of young men answering “definitely” or “probably” has dropped from a consistent level of more than 25 percent in the late 1980s to about 13 percent today, according to Pentagon documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

For recruiters, the shift means a shrinking pool of likely prospects, which makes achieving their mission tougher. That challenge is compounded for the Army and Marine Corps by the 2007 congressional mandates to expand by a combined 70,000 active-duty personnel.

Pentagon officials say the volunteer force is not in jeopardy, but acknowledge that the trends are troubling.

“The current decline in propensity makes recruiting more challenging, but the department is confident that our recruiters ... can continue to sustain the All-Volunteer Force,” Army Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a written statement. “A decrease in today’s youth interest and willingness to serve is something the DoD takes seriously and monitors closely.”

Recruiting commands are spending millions to pay for massive signing bonuses, put more recruiters in the field and develop increasingly sophisticated advertising efforts.

Recruiters are focused on the group of young people they call the “Millennials,” also known as Generation Y or the Internet generation — today’s teens, who are dramatically different from the baby boomers and the so-called “Generation X” that make up the middle- and upper-level ranks of the U.S. military.

Compared to their elders, this new generation has different expectations for their careers and family life, different notions of authority and seniority, and different concepts of public service, experts said.

Another key factor in the decline in “propensity to serve” is the relatively strong economy of the past 25 years and the rise in the number of young people who attend college.

Surveys also show a precipitous decline in interest among black youths, who for years comprised one of the demographic groups most receptive to military service. The 2007 survey marked the first time in decades that young black men were less interested in service than young white men, Defense Department data show.

The services have continued to meet their stated recruiting goals in recent years. But that has required more recruiters on the ground, more sophisticated marketing campaigns and more cash to dole out for enlistment bonuses.

In August 2007, for example, the Army ordered more than 1,000 former recruiters back on duty for a three-month stint in an urgent effort to meet fiscal year-end goals.

The services have also made some changes to their Delayed Entry Programs, reservoirs of applicants who sign enlistment contracts but do not ship out to boot camp for a year or more.

The Army historically has tried to fill its DEP with up to 30 percent of its annual recruiting goal by the start of each fiscal year. But last year the Army, struggling to make its annual goal, paid bonuses of up to $20,000 to convince some recruits in the DEP to ship early.

As a result, the Army has started out the current fiscal year with fewer recruits already slated to ship this year.

The Marine Corps last year extended the amount of time an applicant can spend in the DEP from 365 days to 410 days for the months of May and June. That let recruiters target graduating seniors as well as “rising seniors” who may not be able to ship until the following school year ends.

Still, those are largely short-term, stopgap measures. A bigger issue for the long term is evidence that the quality of recruits is declining. Recruiters are granting more waivers for prospects who would have been disqualified for military service in previous years. In addition, the academic standards are slipping compared to just a few years ago.

For the troops in uniform, that means the new cohort of youngsters coming out of boot camp may have more health and disciplinary problems and more trouble quickly learning the skills needed to perform today’s missions.

As defined by the Youth Poll surveys and propensity levels, today’s recruiting environment is the toughest since the early 1980s, when Congress reinstated the legal requirement that young men register for the draft.

Among the services, the Army has faced the most dramatic decline, from a peak around the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when about 17 percent of young men ages 16 to 21 said they either “definitely” or “probably” would join the Army, to last year, when about 8 percent said that.

“This is something we are concerned with,” said Lt. Col. Shawn Buck of the Army’s Center for Accessions Research.

A key factor affecting today’s recruiting environment is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which today’s teenagers have grown up watching on television.

“We’ve been at war since they were in the fifth grade,” Buck said. “Obviously, that has an impact.”

But the challenges go beyond the wars. Buck points to data that show today’s teens have little contact with people who serve in the military. At the end of the Cold War, about 40 percent of young people had a parent who served in the military. That dropped to about 25 percent in 2003 and to about 20 percent in 2006, Pentagon studies show.

“Clearly, people who know someone who has served are much more likely to join the military,” Buck said. “This is an awareness issue. You’re finding fewer people who really understand what the Army is. The difference between an officer and an NCO ... that’s not really clear to them.”

The Army has begun to recruit among populations it previously overlooked, such as men older than 26. Army recruiters are finding ways to help people who at first appear too overweight or academically underqualified.

Finding young men and women who are inclined to serve but can’t under current eligibility requirements is “one way to expand the market,” Buck said.

Interest in joining the Marine Corps is also at a historic low. While 13 percent of young men considered joining the Corps around the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that’s fallen to less than 8 percent today.

The Marines’ marketing experts say many Americans’ views of military service are shifting.

“Today’s kids and their parents don’t necessarily equate military service with public service,” said Randy Shepard, a senior partner with JWT, which has handled the Corps’ advertising account since 1946. “To them, service is Habitat for Humanity, it’s AmeriCorps and all that stuff. So what we are doing is trying to remind people that military service is indeed public service — maybe the highest form of public service.”

Declining interest in serving is not limited to the branches most affected by the current wars.

The Navy also has seen a dramatic drop in propensity to serve, which peaked at 13 percent in 1990 but was down to about 7 percent last year.

“It certainly indicates hard recruiting times,” said John Noble, the chief of research for Navy Recruiting Command. “Time will tell if we will bounce back to the levels that we’ve seen in the past or whether it’s going to continue at this level.”

The Navy’s response to a shrinking pool of likely recruits has been three-pronged: Put more recruiters on the ground, spend more on advertising and offer bigger cash bonuses for enlistment. All of that costs money.

The services face a situation in which they must work harder to win over youths who are not already inclined to serve. “That costs the recruiting commands,” Noble said. “We have to apply more resources to that.”

The Air Force enjoys the highest level of interest among today’s youth, which allows Air Force officials to point out that they maintain the highest recruiting standards among the services, according to criteria such as high school diplomas and test scores.

“Our big appeal for a lot of airmen is that we are so high-tech,” said Maj. Sean McKenna, a spokesman for the Air Force Recruiting Service.

Nevertheless, the decline in propensity to serve is a concern for the Air Force, too. About 10 percent of young men say they are considering joining the Air Force — but that figure was at 17 percent in the late 1980s.

“There is obviously a lot of thought that goes into: ‘How are we going to continue to make our goal?’” McKenna said. “The studies that we are talking about certainly weigh heavy. We would love for propensity numbers to be high. Where they are now, we are going to have to be creative.”

Creative, McKenna said, means going out to large gatherings like concerts, sporting events and NASCAR races, where recruiters can meet and connect with potential recruits.

Experts debate the implications of the declining interest in military service.

Tom Keaney, acting director of the Phillip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, sees the drop in propensity as nothing less than “a test of the all-volunteer force.”

Others disagree. “There is almost no end to the ingenuity of the Pentagon in attracting people. And if push comes to shove, we will simply lower the requirements,” said Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina.

However, Kohn said tomorrow’s recruits may not be as good as those in recent years.

“We’ve gone through a 20-year period when we’ve had a very high quality in the American force,” he said. “Maybe [military leaders] are going to have to learn to live with a force that is less capable coming in. Maybe they’re going to have to learn to live with a force that costs more in terms of training.”

Defense officials have discussed several approaches to bolster recruiting in case the current system becomes unsustainable — but many of the options have downsides, according to internal documents.

Stepping up efforts to recruit prior-service personnel, for example, carries the risk that people will leave the service with the belief they will get a larger bonus when they’re lured back in, documents show.

Recruiting more foreign-born or non-Americans into the force carries political risk, while significantly lowering physical and academic standards risks higher attrition rates, documents show.

This is happening at a time when bringing in high-quality recruits may be more important than ever, as troops are asked to operate increasingly high-tech equipment and take part in complex counterinsurgency operations.

“There is a battle for talent in the 21st century,” Singer said. “Finite resources are not just oil and natural gas. It’s also human capital — human talent. And the military is going to have to be out there battling for it.”

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