After a week of writing and analysis, we have finally come to the last service in the Department of Defense. The final boss of services. The first service, the most essential service, the “military qua military” as David Foster Wallace might put it. Not coincidentally, the service with the biggest problems. The Army.

In this piece we’ll take a look at the Army’s problems, and what it’s doing to help offset those problems. If there’s anything the last week has shown me as I looked at the numbers and read articles and analysis, it’s that this is a complex challenge. And — despite what leadership always said during Iraq and Afghanistan deployments — no military service is very good at handling complex problems. Every service is pretty good at handling simple problems. That’s doubly true of the Army, and its core, the infantry, which has four basic solutions to every problem: flank left, flank right, assault, break contact.

THE BIG STORY

What’s Wrong With Army Recruiting?

Last year the Army fell 34,000 short of its recruiting goals across Active Duty, the Reserves, and the National Guard.

In 2022, the Army missed its recruiting goal for Active Duty by over 15,000 (44,901 recruited, 60,000 expected), fell over 5,000 reservists short of its goal of 14,650, and nearly 14,000 short (24,819) of its goal to recruit 38,430 National Guardsmen.

The Army National Guard has missed big before — not quite this big, but, 10,000 short of 44,342 in 2018 isn’t nothing — and so has the Reserves. It’s been decades since all three components of the Army missed this big, and in the same year.

Amplifying this concern about a very bad year is that the Army is at the beginning of an overhaul and expansion. It’s supposed to be getting bigger, not staying the same — let alone getting smaller. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and farfetched but plausible concerns about China invading Taiwan proved to skeptical planners and domestic-minded politicians that the U.S. was not prepared to fight the type of war that, tragically, has not (as we all prayed and hoped) been left behind as a relic of the 20th century.

Not only is the Army supposed to be getting bigger, but it’s making up for years of skill and knowledge atrophy in the two branches that seem likely to play a much bigger role in future wars than they did during GWOT: artillery and air defense artillery (ADA). In some senses, ADA is being rebuilt almost from the ground. The soldiers and officers that could be fighting three or four years from now at the brigade or division level need to be in training today.

And yet: they are not. Some are heading for the Marine Corps, probably unaware of the controversy swirling around its future mission. Others are heading to the Air Force or the Navy or Space Force.

But Army is the place to and through everything flows, the bedrock of the military, the thing people envision when they see Americans fighting in the Revolutionary War or Civil War or WWI or WWII. The Marine Corps is the “branded” Army, the serious service that bootstraps everything and is disciplined and lean and motivated. The Air Force is the jets of the Army. The Navy is the boats of the Army. The Space Force is — well, it’s figuring that out.

Army is the Army.

And the Army is in trouble. When people think “I might get hurt or killed doing that,” they don’t think “Full Metal Jacket is the Marines,” they think Army. Blackhawk Down is Rangers and Delta, and Hoot’s safety, his trigger finger. That’s Army.

This is the place where culture actually does seem to have intersected meaningfully with fitness and recruiting. The Air Force and Navy can all say “look, you’re really not going to get hurt or killed here unless you want to.” The Marine Corps leans into its identity as a place where violent and unstable people go, so has fewer recruiting problems therefore.

The Army, though, is the face of everything that went wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s the PTSD, and the deaths, and the injuries. Problems stick to the Army in a way they don’t to the Marines, in part because the sort of person who wants to be a Marine doesn’t care on a certain level if those things happen to them (of course they care afterwards, everyone does), that’s why they joined in the first place. Some of those folks join the Army, too — in absolute terms, there are probably more daredevils and adventurers in the Army than in the USMC — but relatively speaking, that’s not the core of the Army or its culture. Airborne Rangers are tolerated within the broader Army, as are Green Berets, but if you joined to be a service support specialist in the motor pool (and I know a few of those guys), they think the combat-focused hoo-ahs are insane, and they do not believe that “every soldiers is a rifleman.” They’re right.

USAREC (the Army’s recruiting command) has to recruit to staff a massive and varied organization that will presumably be rolling noisily forward against heavy opposition under the cover of fighters and bombers, and needs to be pulling from a variety of sources and personalities. There’s much more latitude for that within the Army than in other services. This means it’s more difficult to develop a monoculture in the Army. And that makes the Army more vulnerable to the sorts of concerns we saw in the Office of People Analytics study referenced last week and Monday.

What has the Army done to fight back against the problem of not enough fit people willing or ready to serve? By implementing a program that was so successful the Navy ended up picking it up.

The Future Soldier Preparatory Course has a 95% graduation rate and has sent over 10,000 recruits to basic training this year and last. Those aren’t small numbers. They may not be quite enough to entirely make up for the Army’s shortfall this year — to underline the magnitude of the problem, in 2022 the Army (Active Duty, National Guard, and Reserves) fell 34,000 or almost three Space Forces short of their goal — but it’ll provide significant help.

Furthermore, the Army has institutionalized this program. FSPC is now a de facto “pre-basic” that people who are less educated or out of shape can use to go to basic training, and get fit. One recent graduate featured on Twitter lost 70 pounds over the course of two months, before continuing on. It’s inspiring to see that kind of success story, not just for people in the military, but for civilians, too.

During my time in Ukraine earlier this year training reconnaissance soldiers for the counteroffensive, and last year training civilians for a local defense force based in Lviv, I saw a lot of different fitness profiles, and people from different walks of life. The age range was 19 to people in their mid-60s. Ukrainian volunteers were universally motivated to learn, people who knew why they were standing in the cold or in the heat in heavy body armor. It was the most significant and rewarding training experience of my life — counting my own training, and also training Afghans in (where else?) Afghanistan. A big part of that was I knew everyone who was standing in front of me wanted to be there.

A pre-basic course is, in a sense, just a new basic course — and the old basic course is now an advanced course. Our school system has failed to produce enough people who are “fit to serve,” and so “basic” training (or what we call pre-basic) has become more basic — it’s the fundamentals we didn’t need to impart, for decades, as they were being taught and trained in schools. Now, apparently, they aren’t.

The Army deserves praise for its swift and effective solution to a problem that was exacerbated but not created by the pandemic. The important thing should be recruiting a motivated and competent military. Age should make less of a difference. Fitness should make less of a difference (up to a point, and certainly starting out). If you’re unwilling to adjust standards to recruit a less fit or older force, then the logical answer is to offer more opportunities to meet the standards.

What is the percentage of American youth — of whom only 23% are physically qualified for military service — that will be offset by the new “pre-basic” basic course? 5%? 10%? It may be enough, once expanded and implemented more broadly, to make up for the military’s dipping popularity and people’s concerns about service. Still, this feels like treating a symptom and not the wound. The wound — a misperception of the calculus one ought to make as an able-bodied citizen about service — will take longer to fix, and the solution is not so straightforward.

Looking at how the USMC handles recruiting, and drawing on my memory of recruiters I knew in the Army while serving, the Army should also take a look at how they select for the duty — how it gets incentivized to soldiers and sergeants, and what goes into the professional activity of recruiting. My son considered joining the Army before going to college and, well, the quality of the recruiting played a role in his decision. Now he’s studying engineering at RPI. As an Army veteran, it pains me to say it, but the Marines really do seem to have cracked the code when it comes to putting the right people in recruiting offices. That’s part of the battle, too.

Ultimately, if war breaks out, we’ll engage in it with the military we have, not the military we want. It will be a shame if we aren’t able to field a sufficient core military, a scaffold on which to build the system we’ll need to fight and win. This time, unlike in WWI and WWII, we won’t have robust European allies to help. This time we’ll be the center of the effort, the heart that cannot fail. And we need people training, today, so that tomorrow we don’t lose.

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TOP READS IN THE MILITARY

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TOP READS FOR VETERANS

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HUMOR

Even Duffel Blog is getting in on the Army’s recruiting problems. I can’t say this is the funniest post I’ve seen by them, but it’s a good companion piece for today’s writing.