While militaries continue to utilize drones on the battlefield, they won’t be replacing boots on the ground anytime soon — posing a challenge to the Pentagon as it struggles to meet its military recruitment quotas.
For 2023, the Army , Navy and Air Force all missed their recruiting targets; only the Marine Corps achieved its targeted goal. However, this comes after the Corps faced structure cuts leaving recruiters having to fill 19,000 fewer active duty and reserve positions than it needed in 2020.
For the past two years, the Army has failed to meet its recruitment goals by 10,000 soldiers each year. The current size of the active duty Army is the smallest it has been since the 1940s — standing at 445,000 soldiers.
It’s not just the active-duty Army struggling to recruit — so is the National Guard and Reserves. Last year, the Army reserves had just 9,319 enlistees — falling short of its 14,650 new soldiers target.
As war wages in Gaza and Ukraine , U.S. military officials are aware of how vital it is for the United States military to be reliant on people just as much as they are on weapons and new technology.
However, only 23% of young Americans qualified to enlist without a waiver, and less than 10% of young Americans said they would consider enlisting, according to a 2022 poll from the Pentagon’s Office of People Analytics. In addition, the number of American 18-year-olds is expected to drop from 9.4 million in 2025 to 8 million by 2029. With all of these factors at play, military recruiters have their work cut out for them.
“The all-volunteer force faces one of its greatest challenges since inception,” Ashish S. Vazirani , acting Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, told the House of Representatives late last year.
Currently, Congress has two measures set forth that they hope to provide the military manpower in the case of the United States going to war. One of the provisions would call for all young men to be automatically registered for the Selective Service, and the other would make women eligible for the draft.
To combat a growing apathy toward the military and a hot job market, the U.S. Army continues to seek recruits by offering large signing bonuses and launching expensive advertising campaigns.
However, many modern-day advertisements have failed to elicit the results that the Army has hoped for and have even garnered the branch heavy criticism and backlash.
This year, the U.S. Army signed an $11 million deal with the United Football League that included having the Army insignia on players' uniforms and on banners throughout the stadium. The deal also entailed for UFL owner Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to make five social media posts promoting the Army, but he did not uphold his end of the bargain.
Internal review by the United States Army found that the deal not only failed to bring in any new recruits, but actually led to the loss of 38 enlistments.
There was concern about partnering with UFL, an unofficial minor league version of the National Football League , given the recently created franchise’s low viewerships. A merger between the XFL and the United States Football League, the UFL boasted higher views than seen in the other two franchises, but it still failed to garner the high viewership found in the NCAA, which generates ten times the number of viewers.
Internal documents reveal the UFL staffing was “inexperienced” and caused many communication breakdowns between the Army in terms of rendering out marketing plans.
In another failed campaign from three years ago, the Army released five animated videos following the backstory of real-life soldiers as they navigated their journey into joining the military. Unlike previous advertising campaigns, the videos did not highlight on activities that will be completed in the military but instead gave each soldier a chance to share their personal story of why they joined.
"Research tells us that young people today see the Army as a "distant star" — a place requiring a nearly superhuman level of discipline with little relevance to their daily lives,” said Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, Chief of Army Enterprise Marketing. “Similarly, youth don’t necessarily connect with those who serve or see common ground in terms of interests, abilities, and goals. ‘The Calling’ shatters these misperceptions by showing that Soldiers are all of us: real people with hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations, families , friends, and obstacles to overcome.”
One of the videos which shared the story of Cpl. Emma Malonelord, in which she shared how she has been fighting for freedom at a young age, showed an animated video of her with her two mothers at a gay rights rally.
This video, along with the other four videos, garnered mass criticism, including from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in which he tweeted a side-by-side video of The Calling video of Emma with a military ad of Russian soldiers.
“Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea....,” Cruz tweeted.
The comments from this video, along with the other four, were eventually disabled.
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“The comments violated our social media policy and were not aligned with Army values. Out of respect for the safety and wellbeing of our soldiers and their families, we have disabled the comments,” Laura DeFrancisco, public affairs chief for the Army Enterprise Marketing Office, told Army Times.
In January, The Calling was delisted from the Army’s YouTube platform.
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