Army News, news from Iraq, - Army Times

Have recruit incentives reached their limit?

The military is spending a ton of money on recruiting enough troops to maintain the overall force as well as to grow the Army and Marines. Yet it’s doing so in a field that is increasingly difficult to plow — fewer eligible recruits, fewer parents willing to back a military career and a falling propensity to serve.

And some think throwing more money at the problem can go only so far.

“There may very well be a point of diminishing returns in the current environment” in terms of spending on bonuses, advertising and recruiters, said Lawrence Kapp, a military manpower analyst with the Congressional Research Service.

Kapp spoke during a March 6 discussion at the Heritage Foundation in Washington about whether recruiting during the “Long War” has “reached its effective frontier.”

The Pentagon’s top personnel official disagreed with Kapp.

“The economist argues that everything diminishes over time,” said David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. “But … the way the public sees that statement is that it means, ‘These don’t work anymore, this won’t be a good idea.’ That’s not true. The bonuses have been very effective.”

Chu says the Pentagon is largely succeeding at the task of filling the ranks, despite the social obstacles. A graphic he displayed laid out the eligibility problem in stark terms: Of the potential pool of youths ages 17-24 available in 2007, the vast majority were considered unfit for service because of medical and physical problems — mostly obesity — along with poor test scores, drug use, criminal records and even too many dependents.

Out of 31.2 million people in that pool, he said, only 4.7 million could be considered for military service.

That pool is affected by a number of negative factors, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at the forefront.

“These are the largest and longest operations since Vietnam,” said Heidi Golding, a Congressional Budget Office analyst. “The deployments and the risks associated with them have affected the willingness of individuals to serve.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Kapp said. “The reality of what we’re doing overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan ... might be kind of weeding out those who are risk-averse. Everyone in the military today ... [is] fully aware of the risks that they’re facing and encountering, and they’re going ahead and joining or re-upping,” he said.

But a falling “propensity to serve” among America’s youths does not bode well for the military’s effort to continue filling the ranks — particularly when, as Kapp noted, 85 percent of those who do have a propensity to serve still don’t join the military.

The decline is exacerbated, Kapp said, by a dwindling number of fathers who are military veterans and what he called an increasing expectation that high school graduates will attend college.

Chu agreed. “I think our biggest challenge is this issue of national support,” he said. “Recruiting is not an Army issue, an Air Force issue, a Navy issue. It is a national issue.”

“There has to be some way to of re-connecting service, broadly speaking, with kind of the white-collar expectations of many of our youth today,” Kapp said.

In order to increase the pool of best-quality recruits, Chu said, the military must make itself “attractive to young Americans ... [and] it is critical that that choice be supported.”

At the same time, he said, the military cannot reverse course on its standards. The military strives to recruit individuals with a high aptitude for service and a high level of personal behavior.

“We largely succeed,” he said, even as he acknowledged the Army’s slipping percentage of recruits with high school diplomas.

Calls for reinstituting the draft have been heard, including from some members of Congress.

Golding argued that the U.S. would have a more representative force under a draft because student deferments have been shortened considerably.

But she also pointed out that the two-year tour of duty that current law mandates if a draft were reinstated would not work in a world with 12-month deployments, much less 15 months, along with time required for training. In addition, the average experience level of the force would drop substantially, she said.

Chu said the all-volunteer force “is consistent with our traditions as a free society,” and added that he would not consider a return to the draft unless there was “a demand for the military so large that it would overwhelm the available youth cohort.”

The end of the Iraq war, at least, would remove a major obstacle, Golding pointed out. And the available pool of potential recruits will continue to grow; the youth population is forecast to grow by at least 10 percent by 2025, she said. In the meantime, Golding said she would place more emphasis on the college “market.”

Recruiters tend to focus on the high school market, she said, but “many people who begin college don’t complete it.”

Longer-term suggestions raised during the presentation included loosening physical standards; boosting spending on youth programs such as the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and Civil Air Patrol; and expanding the “troops to teachers” program to increase the pool of positive “influencers” in the civilian population.