State of the Army 2023
The service is prepping for war in the Pacific—and hoping its recruiting problems won’t continue for a fourth consecutive year.
BEN WATSON | MARCH 2, 2023
ARMY CHINA PERSONNEL UKRAINE
United States Army officials are eager to talk about the future. They even have a framework ready for it called the “Army of 2030,” as well as a new and novel way of rehearsing for war that seems truly next-level. But the Army in 2023 has a growing and arguably more urgent matter to work out first: a steadily dwindling number of soldiers in uniform.
It’s rare for a military service to face as much public scrutiny over personnel and recruiting shortfalls as the U.S. Army has endured over the past three years. During the last fiscal year, the service missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers, which is an entire division’s worth of troops. So what’s going on? And what will it take to reverse the trend?
Coming off two decades of war in the Middle East, today’s young Americans appear to be less interested in enlisting in the Army than they’ve been at almost any point in the last 50 years—going back to the first days of the “all-volunteer” force amid the final months of America’s embarrassing retreat from Vietnam. The reality is that life in the military today is often seen as simply too dangerous compared to other occupations, especially amid the current record-high employment in the U.S. That’s what service officials told the Associated Press last week following months of heated vitriol from conservative lawmakers, many of whom have trained their sights on diversity and inclusion programs in the Defense Department as enemy number one when it comes to the Army’s recent manpower shortfalls.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2023/03/state-army-2023/383485/
