The Air Force and Space Force are currently on track to meet their fiscal 2025 recruiting goals, the Department of the Air Force’s top recruiting official said, keeping up a hot streak after several challenging years.
“All components [of the Air Force] and the Space Force are either on or ahead of their curve for where we should be this time in the year,” Brig. Gen. Christopher R. Amrhein, the commander of the Air Force Accessions Center and the Air Force Recruiting Service, told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
“Recruiting is on a very solid footing. I think it’s probably a little premature for me to slap the table and say we got ’25, but I will tell you that it’s all trending in the right direction,” he added.
Last September, the Air Force Recruiting Service announced it was increasing its goals for 2025: 32,500 recruits for the Active-Duty Air Force, 7,600 for the Air Force Reserve, 8,679 for the Air National Guard, and 800 for the Space Force.
Amrhein told reporters in September that the Active-Duty component goals were “ambitious.” And that goal was later increased to 33,100 enlisted accessions for the Active component.
“It’s not uncommon to have mid-year increases, but that’s pretty substantial,” he said in an interview.
Just a few years ago, the Air Force—along with the other military branches—was in a recruiting slump that saw the service eke out its 2022 goals and miss its Active-Duty goal for the first time in years in 2023.
Over the last 18 months, however, trends have been positive. In fiscal 2024, the Air Force Active-Duty goal was 27,100 recruits, an objective it exceeded when 27,139 new Airmen were shipped to Basic Military Training. Other components also saw gains last year: the Air National Guard saw a 37 percent increase in accessions, for example.
“It’s a mix of training, it’s a mix of being innovative in our outreach and social media, and then it’s also a bit of resourcing,” Amrhein said.
For example, to help boost the number of recruits this year, the service additional 277 extra recruiters, Amrhein said, and that many of these were able to join the ranks at start of this fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2024.
“That’s pretty fast,” Amrhein said. “We’re almost through getting all 277 of them onboarded and out to the field.”
He also credited increased outreach with outside organizations and increased collaboration with the broader Air Force enterprise, which has enabled the recruiters to draw on support from local bases and commands.
“It’s not just community outreach, but it’s synchronized community outreach … not only at the local level, kind of the wing level, but at [major command] level, and even at the Headquarters Air Force level,” Amrhein said.
Amrhein, as commander of the recently established Air Force Accessions Center and the Air Force Recruiting Service, is in charge of enlisted accessions for both the Air Force and Space Force, as well as Officer Training School and the new Warrant Officer Training School. He also oversees the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), the service’s largest source of commissioned officers, and the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), a youth development program that does not incur a military obligation but which many high schoolers go through on their way to joining the Air Force.
“There’s no one silver bullet, but the fact that I think we’ve honed in on the right ingredients, and they’re all working,” Amrhein said. “They’re coming together in an excellent form. Reach and familiarity is still our number one strategic issue to work through: the familiarity of the Air Force and Space Force missions. And now, having ROTC under the command, we can expand that under one unified voice of outreach, one unified voice of the opportunities that are there to serve our nation.”
The Air Force has expanded the number of people in its Delayed Entry Program (DEP), which allows people to enlist in the U.S. military while delaying active duty. More than 13,000 people are in that pipeline, the largest amount since November 2015, according to the service.
“The DEP has been on an upward trend, but it continues to go up, “Amrhein said.
The 800 Space Force recruits for 2025 pales in comparison to the Air Force, but those efforts have had a major impact since there are approximately 9,800 Active-Duty Guardians. While the Air Force Recruiting Service is in charge of Space Force recruiting, Amrhein said it is working on “standing up a dedicated Space Force recruiting element that will grow into a squadron” within the command so Guardians can recruit the next generation of their ranks.
“Right now, they are building out actual Guardian recruiters and I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to also look at, ‘What is the future? How do we do we do talent management for the Space Force any differently?’” Amrhein said.
The Space Force’s smaller recruiting goal shouldn’t bely its importance, he said.
“Yes, it’s smaller in numbers, but if you miss by one, it hurts a lot more, and so we have to keep laser focus on that right now,” Amrhein said.