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The Answer to Army’s Recruiting Woes: A Dedicated Career Path for Recruiters

Two years into a recruiting swoon that's left it 30k troops short, the Army looks to corporate America for answers

Deviating from the analysis of VA Medical Centers and hospitals to look at some of the earlier reporting we did on military recruitment, and evaluate the Army’s announced changes to its recruiting strategy. You never want to have to react on the battlefield, you want to force your enemy to react to you, and that goes triple off the battlefield when it comes to a thing as broad and important and multi-variable as recruitment. I’m skeptical that the Army’s changes will bear fruit. Also, I applaud its willingness to take risks and “shake things up,” as its current approach is failing.

THE BIG STORY

The Answer to Army’s Recruiting Woes: A Dedicated Career Path for Recruiters

Two years into a recruiting swoon that's left it 30k troops short, the Army looks to corporate America for answers

Some of the first stories on Military Media covered the recruiting crisis from the perspective of different services. One takeaway was that the Marine Corps (USMC) does a good job at recruiting. Another takeaway was that the Army does a bad job (which up until now was blamed on circumstances rather than its institutional approach).

Yesterday, as reported widely in premiere military news outlets, the Army said “enough.” For the first time in decades, the Army endeavored to overhaul its recruiting process from the ground up. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth directed that a new MOS (42T) be dedicated to focus entirely on recruiting, analogous to a military “HR” branch, rather than the secondary MOS that many in the Army take on during a 3-year recruiting duty that is seen by many as an annoying career distraction at best, and a waste of resources at worst.

This represents a tacit acknowledgment that the Army’s recruiting problems are and have been internal and controllable, rather than the fault of external variables beyond anyone’s power. In many cases, this acknowledgement of agency represents an important and necessary first step. Developing a durable and effective strategy to harness the knowledge that change is up to the Army (rather than unknowable, hazy cultural trends) is another problem altogether.

The Army’s answer has been — somewhat surprisingly — different from that of the USMC. The USMC approaches recruiting the way it approaches many other challenges; by leaning into it, and “doing more with less.” Charismatic and gregarious Marines are identified for recruiting duty, and given professional incentives to minimize the feeling that recruiting is onerous or embarrassing. Recruiting is seen holistically, as a thing that an ambitious officer or NCO will do to help the force, rather than an inconvenience. Not everyone comes away from the experience happy or fulfilled, this is the military we’re talking about, here. But the outcome speaks for itself: the Marines hit their recruiting goals for 2023.

The Army is trying new things to get citizens into uniform. Whether its approach will work or not is up for debate. Photo via DVIDS (Army Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Clinton Wood, 84th Training Command Public Affairs)

Rather than lean into the USMC model — which it attempted to emulate with some (not enough) success — the Army is adopting the approach that recruiting ought to be a full time endeavor. It hopes that institutionalizing recruiting will help channel the correct people into a job that has a steep learning curve, and retain them after they have mastered it.

As someone who is proud of his Army service, and wants to see the Army succeed not just because I have a personal affiliation with it but because as a veteran and a citizen, I want our Army to be robust and strong so I can sleep at night. And so I have to wonder, based on previous reporting, whether these reforms will truly help the Army accomplish its goals.

The Army and Hormuth are to be applauded for their willingness to experiment with change. The biggest way to accelerate a crisis is to ignore it. And by acknowledging that the Army is having trouble recruiting — rather than claiming (as had been popular in months past) that America was having trouble furnishing recruits for one reason or another (fitness, culture wars, the economy, etc.) — its leaders are in a great position to find answers. Given time, the Army will find them.

Still, I worry that this solution of permanent recruiting staff will not, ultimately, prove effective. Recruiting is like other endeavors in that it requires months of training and years of experience to get right. It is unlike other endeavors in that the military (and the Army) hopes to recruit a certain type of person who is looking for a certain type of lifestyle: mostly younger, mostly ambitious and open to adventure, mostly inexperienced. The advantage of a mixed-use approach to recruiting such as the one used by the USMC (out of necessity, as is always the case with them) is that recruiters come into the position from somewhere else; they bring with them the credibility and stories for which most recruits are looking. And because USMC recruiters have been selected for their ability to tell stories, and explain, and inspire, they’re able to tell potential recruits about what it’s like to train alongside Norwegian soldiers at the Arctic Circle, or the culture on Okinawa. They’ve done a tour of duty (or more) elsewhere, and are coming into recruiting as a way of explaining that experience to others.

This is a very different approach to structuring recruiting than what the Army is likely to adopt. With the USMC, one does one’s job as a Marine, one goes to recruit for the Marines as a Marine, and then when the recruiting is done, one goes back to one’s job before (assuming one isn’t using recruiting as a way to transition into some new job, a perk of recruiting) having accomplished an important service for the Corps. It is a common trope in movies and literature (not always the best source for evidence, but not irrelevant, either) that the very person who recruits a person into service is sometimes there to lead them into battle, or fight alongside them; a subtle but important component of the responsibility that gets shared when one joins the Army or USMC. Recruiting has stakes beyond the numbers one is expected to hit by the end of the month.

In the Army, this was how things were run before, but without sufficient institutional support. I can testify (as can any Army veteran) that recruiting duty was seen as a kind of stain, evidence of some sort of personal failing (family, psychological, unfitness for leadership) that distracted one from doing what was truly important. In other words, a cultural problem internal and specific to the Army.

Under the new model, recruiters will just be recruiters; private to master sergeant, lieutenant to colonel. This does not seem like a good way to resolve the problem of low morale and low numbers. It seems, instead, either like someone who does not understand what it is like to be young and entering the military for the first time’s idea of how to fix a problem specific to a particular service, or like a desperate hail mary — an “anything is better than nothing” approach. On that last point, at least, everyone can probably agree.

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