ADDRESSING THE U.S. MILITARY RECRUITING CRISIS
DAVID BARNO AND NORA BENSAHELMARCH 10, 2023
SPECIAL SERIES - STRATEGIC OUTPOSTArmyRecruitingEvent
The all-volunteer force may finally have reached its breaking point.
During the first years of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many military experts worried that the constant deployments would “break” the force since they expected that fewer young Americans would volunteer to serve in a wartime military. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Yet a perilous recruiting crisis began just after the United States fully withdrew from Afghanistan last summer, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. As a result, the U.S. military is shrinking, not because of any strategic choices, but simply because there aren’t enough qualified volunteers — and that may have enormous implications for the U.S. strategic position in an increasingly uncertain and dangerous world.
How bad is the recruiting crisis? During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target. This shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000. And the current fiscal year is likely to be even worse. Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000. That means that the nation’s primary land force could plummet by as much as 7 percent in only two years — at a time when its missions are increasing in Europe and even in the Pacific, where the Army provides many of the critical wartime theater enablers without which the other services cannot function.
https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/addressing-the-u-s-military-recruiting-crisis/
