The U.S. military is facing a recruiting crisis. It’s worse for some branches than it is for others. But the fact is, the Air Force barely met its Active-duty recruiting goal last fiscal year, and now half-way through fiscal 2023, it’s clear it will miss targets this year by 10 percent or more.
Leadership concern about recruiting was a persistent theme throughout the AFA Warfare Symposium last month in Colorado. The Air & Space Forces are retaining members who have already raised their right hands, but getting new volunteers in the door is growing increasingly difficult.
It is tempting to view this as another in a long series of predictable blips, the familiar boom-and-bust cycle of the recruiting business. After all, we have all seen shortfalls before: After the Cold War in the early 1990s, when the military shrank; during the dot-com boom later that decade, as military pay fell far behind the private sector; in the 2000s when the Iraq War dragged into its third year and beyond, and stop-loss orders, deaths, and repeated lengthy deployments ground down the force.
It is tempting to view this as another blip in the boom-and-bust cycle of recruiting. It is not.
Yet the current crisis and ongoing national trends suggest the Air & Space Forces—indeed all the military services—face continued headwinds well into the future.
Today’s nationwide unemployment rate is running at 3.6 percent. That matches the lowest rate ever in the 50 years of the All-Volunteer Force. Since 2015, unemployment has only exceeded 5 percent just once, in the midst of the COVID-19-induced nationwide shutdown of 2020. By contrast, in the prior 20 years it exceeded that figure 35 of the 50 years since the All-Volunteer Force was established.
That suggests the military is in a more competitive environment than ever, at a time when other societal changes are also working to the services’ disadvantage:
- Americans are having fewer children. The first 18-year-olds to come of age during the All-Volunteer Force era were born in 1955, when the U.S. fertility rate was 3.42. By 2005, when today’s 18-year-olds were born, that rate was down to 2.05. Today, it’s 1.78.
- Americans are more protective of our children. In 1983, 46.2 percent of 16-year-old Americans were licensed to drive. In 2018, that number was just 25.6 percent, even though cars today are safer than they’ve ever been. A parent with one child has more time and more incentive to guard their only child than one with three; that’s common sense. According to the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of American parents characterize their own parenting as “overprotective.”
- More 18- and 19-year-olds are going to college. In 1974, 33 percent of Americans this age were enrolled in college; in 2020, that number was 49 percent. There are many reasons for this, including that with fewer kids, parents focus greater attention, resources, and hopes on those they have. But the bottom line is that further erodes the population of young Americans willing to enlist in the military.
- College is more expensive, but easier to pay for. Here’s a quandary. In 1973, a year in college for a student perusing a four-year degree was $1,900; adjusted for inflation to 2018 dollars, it was $11,400. By 2018, the cost was approaching $25,000. In 1975, average student debt at graduation was $1,000 (about $5,000 in today’s money). In 2021, the average student graduated with $31,000 in debt. Parents in many cases also carry loans on top of that figure. Easy access to college loans short-circuits the military’s traditional pitch: join the military today, and we’ll give you money for college later.
All of this is to say that today’s recruiting challenges are systemic to our national circumstances. What’s more, while they are unique to our times, they are not unique to our military.
Consider that the construction industry is facing the same challenges at the same time. Like the military, construction jobs skew heavily toward young males. According to the online publication Construction Dive, the industry anticipates a labor shortage of some 500,000 workers as older workers retire. America is not producing enough new plumbers, electricians, heavy equipment operators, carpenters, and technicians to match demand.
The military can’t solve this issue the way construction firms do, however. In Washington, D.C., and much of the nation, construction crews are increasingly made up of Spanish-speaking immigrants. That’s a demographic shift over the past 30 years, but one defined by choices. Young American men aren’t choosing those dirty, grubby, grinding jobs. So no surprise they’re not as interested in taking military jobs, either.
In 1970, 1.7 percent of Americans of all ages were serving in the military. Today, that percentage is less than 0.38 percent, not even one-quarter of the percentage from 50 years ago. The population is up 70 percent in that time, and our military is less than half what it was. Project those figures out and you will see diminishing returns. This picture won’t get better without major changes.
Here’s the heart of the problem. Americans don’t know their military. Increasing numbers never meet anyone who serves. They see a few military people in airports, perhaps, or maybe they see a Guard or Reserve convoy on the highway now and then, but they don’t have a relationship like they did a generation ago. Baby Boomers all knew what their dads did “in the war,” because almost all our dads did time in uniform. Today, that’s only true of a select population of military “brats.” For much of America, military service is something done by people they’ll never know and never meet.
This is dangerous to a Democracy and risky to our nation. As AFA Chairman Bernie Skoch noted at the Warfare Symposium, America was essentially run and led by veterans 50 years ago. Veterans dominated Congress in those days. They held state and local office, led media institutions, and worked in every corner of our economy.
“That’s not true today,” Skoch said. “In 1974 when I was commissioned into the Air Force, 82 percent of Congress members were veterans—82 percent! Today, in our new Congress, just 18 percent of lawmakers are veterans. We’ve gone from four of every five members as veterans to less than one in every five.”
Across the population, the percentage of veterans in the population has plunged by two-thirds since 1980, according to the Census Bureau.
The Vietnam War was disastrous to our nation in many ways, but it ended relatively quickly. Fighting really didn’t ramp up until the early 1960s, and it was over in 1973. By contrast, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ground on for two decades. Protests ended the Vietnam War, in which American draftees made up the bulk of the force. Regular kids from all over the country. The Forever Wars in the Middle East would not have lasted so long if they hadn’t been fought by such a small subset of the population.
America needs a reckoning with itself over whose responsibility it is to defend and protect our nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic. It isn’t someone else’s responsibility. It belongs to all of us, collectively.