The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Children to Join
Pentagon scrambles to retain the main pipeline for new service members as disillusioned families steer young people away
WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Ben KeslingFollow
June 30, 2023 12:01 am ET
Sky Nisperos’s grandfather came to the U.S. from Mexico, and became an American citizen by serving in the U.S. Navy. Her father, Ernest Nisperos, is an active-duty officer in the Air Force with two decades of service. For years, Sky planned to follow a similar path.
“I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” the 22-year-old said. “It was stuck in my head.”
Now, one of the most influential people in her life—her father—is telling her that a military career may not be the right thing.
The children of military families make up the majority of new recruits in the U.S. military. That pipeline is now under threat, which is bad news for the Pentagon’s already acute recruitment problems, as well as America’s military readiness.
“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”
After the patriotic boost to recruiting that followed 9/11, the U.S. military has endured 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no decisive victories, scandals over shoddy military housing and healthcare, poor pay for lower ranks that forces many military families to turn to food stamps, and rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.
At the same time, the labor market is the tightest it has been in decades, meaning plenty of other options exist for young people right out of school.
U.S. recruiting shortfalls represent a long-term problem that, if not resolved, would compel the military to reduce its force size. With America embarking on a new era of great-power competition with China and Russia, that problem has become more serious.
China, which has around two million serving personnel, versus a little under 1.4 million in the U.S., has steadily expanded its military capabilities in recent decades, especially in the South China Sea. The most immediate threat is a possible conflict with China over Taiwan, which would require a rapid and sustained response from all parts of the U.S. armed forces.
“I’ve been studying the recruiting market for about 15 years, and we’ve never seen a condition quite like this,” said a senior Defense Department official.
Toughest year
The U.S. Army in 2022 had its toughest recruiting year since the advent of the all-volunteer military in 1973 and missed its goal by 25%. This year, it expects to end up about 15,000 short of its target of 65,000 recruits.
The Navy expects to fall short by as many as 10,000 of its goal of nearly 38,000 recruits this year, and the Air Force has said it is anticipating coming in at 3,000 below its goal of nearly 27,000. The Marine Corps met its target last year of sending 33,000 to boot camp, and expects to meet its goals this year, but its leaders described recruitment as challenging.
Only 9% of young people ages 16-21 said last year they would consider military service, down from 13% before the pandemic, according to Pentagon data.
Pentagon officials see recruitment shortfalls as a crisis and pledge to hit their targets in the future to stave off making changes to the force structure.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she expects within weeks to begin drafting a proposal for a recruiting overhaul so sweeping that Congress might need to pass legislation to enact all of it.
She declined to provide details but said a key element will be to coordinate with veterans’ groups. “Right now we are not in a comprehensive, structured way leveraging our relationships with veterans organizations,” Wormuth said.
The Army has stepped up and modernized its marketing, launched remedial courses to bring unqualified young people to a level where they can join and revised some benefits.
Army recruiters spoke with members of the National FFA Organization, formerly called Future Farmers of America, at an FFA convention in Indianapolis, Ind., in October. PHOTO: KAITI SULLIVAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Defense officials said they aren’t doing a good job of battling what they call misperceptions. They said many families want their children to go on to higher education after high school, considering the military a stumbling block instead of a steppingstone. Once a young person is on a path to a career, they aren’t as likely to put on a uniform, they said.
When the draft ended at the close of the Vietnam War, the military fostered recruitment with the promise of a good career with retirement benefits and healthcare, as well as education benefits to prepare soldiers for life after the military. That strategy worked, and the Army typically met its overall needs.
It did so by relying heavily on veterans and military families to develop the next generation of recruits, especially in the region known in the military as the “Southern Smile,” a curving region from the mid-Atlantic and down across the southern U.S.
Today, nearly 80% of all new Army recruits have a family member who has served in uniform, according to the service. That can be a good thing, said Col. Mark Crow, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, because “people who know the most about it stick around.”
Depending too much on military families could create a “warrior caste,” Wormuth said. Her plans seek to draw in people who have no real connection to the military and to broaden the appeal of service.
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Sky Nisperos, who moved around the world as a military brat, said that as a teen she began to see the effect of her father’s nearly dozen deployments and tours away from his family. Ernest Nisperos said he remembers being asleep when one of his kids jabbed him in the ribs to wake him. He put Sky’s sister in a wrestling ankle lock before he realized he was back home.
“My sister and I would say, ‘It’s just drill sergeant-dad mode,’ especially for the month he came back,” Sky said.
Ernest Nisperos realized his deployments, which involved battle planning and top secret intelligence, were taking a toll. In 2019, after he returned from Afghanistan, he took the family to Disneyland. During the nightly fireworks extravaganza, he cowered in the fetal position while his family and “Toy Story” characters looked on.
Sky worried her father would end up like her grandfather, the military patriarch, who in the years since he retired from the Navy started to have what the family describes as flashbacks to his time in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2005, sometimes yelling that he needed to take cover from a nonexistent attack.
Her father decided he didn’t want that life for Sky and her two siblings.
‘What was it all for?’
Some on the left see the military as a redoubt of fringe conservatism. Oath Keepers, the militia group involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol whose leaders were found guilty of seditious conspiracy, and other extremists have touted their veteran credentials. Those on the right have expressed concerns about the military focusing on progressive issues, or in the terms of some Republican lawmakers, being too “woke.”
The sudden and unpopular conclusion to the war in Afghanistan in 2021 added to the disenchantment of some veterans, including Catalina Gasper, who served in the Navy. Gasper said she and her husband, who spent more than two decades in the Army, used to talk to their boys, now 7 and 10, about their future service, asking them if they wanted to be Navy SEALs.
In July 2019, on her last combat deployment to Afghanistan, she was stationed at a base in Kabul when the Taliban launched an attack. The blast battered Gasper’s body and she was transported back to the U.S. for treatment and recovery.
She was left with lingering damage from a traumatic brain injury. She is sensitive to loud sounds and bright lights. She has recurrent dizziness and forgets words. She also has bad knees and herniated discs in her back.
The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, precipitating Kabul’s fall to the Taliban. “We’re left with the gut-wrenching feeling of, ‘What was it all for?’ ” she said.
She said she was a patriot but decided she would do everything she could to make sure her kids never enter the military. “I just don’t see how it’s sustainable if the machine keeps chewing up and spitting out” our young people, she said.
Katherine Kuzminski, head of the Military, Veterans and Society Program at Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan security think tank, said the pandemic exacerbated the military’s long-term recruiting problems. “You can’t underestimate the fact we didn’t have recruiters on college and high school campuses for two years,” she said. “Recruiters are the only military access point for many people” without family or friends in the military.
Potential Army recruits at the FFA convention used virtual reality headsets. PHOTO: KAITI SULLIVAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Wormuth, the Army secretary, said she is working with the Department of Education to streamline access to schools. Even with federal laws in place that guarantee military recruiters access to high school and college students, school administrators can limit the scope of visits and restrict recruiters’ movements and activities in schools.
Recruiters are competing with some of the lowest unemployment numbers in decades, and entry-level jobs in the service industry that can promise quick paychecks, no commitments and no wait times to start.
“To be honest with you it’s Wendy’s, it’s Carl’s Jr., it’s every single job that a young person can go up against because now they are offering the same incentives that we are offering, so that’s our competition right now,” said Sgt. Maj. Marco Irenze, of the Nevada Army National Guard.
Defense officials said the military pay scale was designed for single teenage men content to live in barracks and who joined to seek adventure, among other reasons. But the military has seen a shift from teens to people in their 20s, who come in later in life with greater expectations for benefits, pay and marketable skills and who pay more attention to the job market.
The lowest-ranking troops make less than $2,000 a month, although pay is bolstered by benefits including healthcare, food and housing, leaving them few out-of-pocket expenses.
Families or those who live off base can find expenses outstrip income. More than 20,000 active-duty troops are on SNAP benefits, otherwise known as food stamps, according to federal data.
When service members move to a new base they often have to spend money out of pocket—even though the Army is supposed to cover all costs, according to Kathy Roth-Douquet, CEO of Blue Star Families, a military-family advocacy group that is currently asking Congress to mandate more funding for troops’ housing.
“If it’s too expensive to serve in the military, families won’t recommend service,” she said. “This hurts the main pipeline of recruitment.”
The promise of a pension down the line isn’t as attractive as it once was, said West Point’s Crow. Only 19% of active-duty troops stayed until retirement age in 2017, according to the Pentagon. To tackle that problem, the military started a system in 2018 that allows troops to invest in what is essentially a 401(k) program, so if they leave the military before full retirement they can still benefit.
Prep courses
The Department of Defense said 77% of American youth are disqualified from military service due to a lack of physical fitness, low test scores, criminal records including drug use or other problems. In 2013, about 71% of youth were ineligible.
The Army estimates that pandemic pressures on education including remote learning, illness, lack of internet access and social isolation lowered scores on the ASVAB, the military’s standardized test for potential recruits, by as much as 9%. Those who score below a certain level on the test and on physical readiness tests can’t join without improving their scores.
Lt. Col. Dan Hayes, a Green Beret who once taught Special Forces captains, some of the highest-performing soldiers in the Army, took charge of the Future Soldier Prep Course in Fort Jackson, S.C. The course takes Army recruits who can’t perform academically or physically and gets them up to standards that allow them to join the service. Other programs help new soldiers raise scores.
“We’re looking at the problems in society and recruiting and realizing we have to meet people half way,” said Hayes.
The Army is adapting marketing techniques from the private sector. One early lesson: The Cold War-era slogan, “Be All You Can Be,” performed better than a recent one, “Army of One,” which didn’t reflect the teamwork the service thinks appeals to current teenagers. The slogan also emphasizes that the military offers career development and a broader sense of purpose, some of its strongest selling points.
Maj. Gen. Deborah Kotulich, the director of the Army’s recruiting and retention task force, a unit convened to address recent shortfalls, said potential recruits should know the Army has more than 150 different job fields available.
Maj. General Alex Fink is just as likely to wear a business suit as camouflage fatigues at the Army Enterprise Marketing Office based in Chicago. The Army put Fink, a reservist with a marketing background, in Chicago so he can be in the heart of one of the nation’s advertising and marketing hubs.
“It hadn’t evolved for the last 15 or 20 years,” he said in an interview. “We really couldn’t measure the effectiveness of marketing.”
Fink’s office is now gathering data on every potential recruit. If an Army ad runs on Facebook and a link gets clicked, the service can follow that anonymous user digitally.
“We don’t know your name, but we can start serving you ads,” he said.
And if that user eventually fills out an Army questionnaire, the service has a name to go with that data and can know what kinds of ads work best. “Literally we can track this all the way until a kid signs a contract,” he said.
Restructuring units
Deeper problems soldiers report include moldy barracks, harassment, lack of adequate child care and not enough support for mental health issues such as suicide.
“Parents have concerns about, hey, if my kid joins the military are they going to have good places to live?” Wormuth said. “If my kid joins the military are they going to be sexually harassed, or are they going to be more prone to suicidal ideations?”
She said the Army has encouraged recruiters to be forthright about addressing what might have once been taboo issues in order to dispel those concerns. The service says it has worked to encourage troops to report abuse and harassment and cracked down on such behavior, and has also expanded parental-leave benefits.
Department of Defense officials have said they will have to address the total combat power of the military if the recruiting crisis continues, but that they aren’t ready to yet talk about whether strength will ultimately be affected.
Readiness shortfalls can be masked when units aren’t headed into war, but a full-scale response, such as what would be needed in the Pacific, could expose undermanned units that can’t be deployed or aren’t effective, and ships and aircraft that aren’t combat ready due to a lack of personnel to maintain them.
The military faces decisions on either cutting the size of units or reconfiguring them, or making choices that could hurt the quality of the current forces.
Working to retain existing soldiers is an option. But retention can mean low performers aren’t let go, said Gil Barndollar, a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University of America. “If you’re not cutting your bottom 10% after their initial contracts it’s going to have a long-term effect on high performers,” he said.
Last year, the Army’s top officer, Gen. James McConville, told reporters the service was prepared to eliminate redundancies in the Army’s key fighting units, which are called brigade combat teams. The Army would maintain the number of the units by reducing the personnel in each of them, a restructuring that was prompted by the recruiting crunch, according to one defense official.
Potential recruits at the FFA convention tried a fitness challenge. PHOTO: KAITI SULLIVAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank, said the Army might end up making cuts that leave too few soldiers in platoons and other units. During peacetime and training this may go unnoticed, but if those units have to deploy, the Army would have to take troops from other units to fill in gaps.
Undermanned units aren’t ready to respond quickly, Cancian said, and units with fill-in soldiers don’t have the same effectiveness as a unit whose members trained together for months or years. “What you’re going to see in the Army are hollow units,” he said.
Wormuth, the Army secretary, has said units will get cuts but hasn’t made public her plan. She has for months hinted at broader force reductions.
“If you look at us over the course of the last 50 years of history, the Army is a little bit like an accordion. We tend to expand in times of war,” Wormuth said. “Frankly that’s how the Founding Fathers thought about the military, they didn’t want a large standing militia.”
Still, she said, the Army is “very, very focused” on turning around the recruiting numbers.
Changes may come too late for those about to graduate from high school or college. Sky Nisperos, who once dreamed of becoming an Air Force pilot, graduated from the University of Oklahoma in May. Her plan now, she said, is to become a graphic designer.
Michael R. Gordon contributed to this article.
Design by Andrew Levinson.
Write to Ben Kesling at ben.kesling@wsj.com
