Replies

How else do you get people, when they are not volunteering?

There are lots of ways to draw people in: Extra recruiters; extra advertising; extra pay; extra bonuses; extra education assistance; upgraded living standards at military bases; more flexibility with medical standards, legal standards, intelligence/educational standards, and physical strength standards; more flexibility for prior service folks who want to re-join, etc, etc.

And there are also a bunch of ways to help retain the people we already have -- good retention can help counter-balance soft recruiting results.

I wouldn't say "people aren't volunteering." Even with our extremely tough entrance requirements, the Navy and Air Force are at or over 100%, while the Army and USMC are still recruiting between 80% and 100% of their goal. And there are a hundred ways to open the spigot a little wider if we want to.

That people volunteer at all is amazing to me. I signed up for the Marines in 1981 and made $501 a month (which even back then was crap money) and had four years of living in barracks with up to 80 other men. Granted, the military is not supposed to be Club Med but the conditions I lived under in the early 1980s would be intolerable to about 97% of the rest of the U.S. population.

A common denominator among my fellow Marines was poor economic conditions at home. None of us came from well-to-do families and most of us came from broken homes and grinding poverty. For us, the military was a chance to escape our environments. But for those from properous families, they would have to be nutcases to sign up for what we went through (unless they went in as officers which is a whole different world).

With the phenomenenal economy we are now enjoying as a nation, it should come as no surprise that enlistments are down. The lower classes are probably tapped out so far as military recruiting. Thus, we need to attract some middle-class recruits by increasing pay and improving living conditions on base.

Extra recruiters; extra advertising; extra pay; extra bonuses; extra education assistance; upgraded living standards at military bases; more flexibility with medical standards, legal standards, intelligence/educational standards, and physical strength standards; more flexibility for prior service folks who want to re-join, etc, etc.

Most of those items have been implemented since 9-11. Extra recruiters would appear to me to be counterproductive. Seems to me I've read where the Army is augmenting the recruiting command with 7-800 additional recruiters. As far as I know, recruiters are NCOs. How many line units are being deprived of the leadership those NCOs possess?

I admit I have biases. My first 12 years in the Army (61-73 -- PVT to CPT) I trained with, served with, and even trained a BCT cycle that included some of the last draftees. Between the knee-jerk reactions of Ford and Carter, we lost something in the Army and the country when the draft was ended.

Bottom line is that we are not meeting the quotas and there is no way a person can be forced into the recruiter's office.