The U.S. Military Faces Its Biggest Threat (Not Russia or China)

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Key Points and Summary: The U.S. military faces a critical recruiting crisis, with only 23% of young Americans meeting service qualifications. Despite temporary success in 2024 due to initiatives like the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, broader systemic issues remain unaddressed.

-A leadership void in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness exacerbates challenges, including outdated enlistment policies, underutilized social media platforms, and unclear stances on diversity.

-With increasing global commitments, appointing strong leadership to revise restrictive policies and implement innovative, long-term solutions is vital to ensuring military readiness and securing America’s national defense.

Why U.S. Military Recruitment Faces Its Biggest Crisis in Decades

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, or OUSD (P&R), represents one of the most powerful positions within the national security apparatus of the United States, despite the fact that most people have never heard of it. Tasked with ensuring the readiness of the U.S. military and total force management, the OUSD (P&R) oversees the recruitment and training of the military and civilian personnel; supervises their health affairs and family matters; and advises the Secretary of Defense on the best policies for recruiting and retaining U.S. Armed Forces personnel. As a result, it manages a force of over 1.3 million active-duty military members, 825,000 reserve personnel, and around 600,000 civil service employees, making decisions that resonate decades down the line and consume almost a quarter of the entire defense budget – $184 billion in fiscal year 2023.

Yet, since September 2023 the position has been vacant, with Ashish S. Vazirani acting in this role. During Vazirani’s tenure and that of the last OUSD (P&R) Gil Cisneros between 2021 and 2023, the U.S. military has experienced an unprecedented recruiting crisis brought about by not only the lack of enthusiasm among young Americans for enlisting, but also by a recruiting pool that has shrunk enormously. Due to the overall ageing of the U.S. population, declining education and physical and mental health levels and frequent criminal records, according to a 2020 Qualified Military Available Study by the Department of Defense, 77% of young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 do not meet the minimum qualifications for service without waivers. The number of such waivers issued for felonies due to drug use or conditions like ADHD, for example, has been on the rise as early as 2006. In 2022, one recruit out of six was given a waiver of some type. In the unlikely scenario that the percentage of individuals who cannot qualify has not increased, it means that out of 30,553,272 Americans and permanent residents aged 18 to 24, only 7,027,252 would qualify without a type of waiver. U.S. military recruiters’ task is to reach and grab the attention of these slightly over 7 million young American men and women and convince them to sign up for a few years of difficult life and discipline, while putting their limbs and lives at risk for the United States – all when jobs of comparable salary and that guarantee stability and safety are available on the civilian market.

This is clearly a daunting task. Unsurprisingly, this recruiting crisis has worsened to the point that in 2022, against a projected goal of 232,021 “accessions,” the Branches missed it by 40,369. The crisis repeated itself in 2023, when the U.S. military again missed the recruiting goal by 41,336 accessions. Last September, however, representatives of the Branches and the Department of Defense, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, touted the alleged resounding success of the 2024 recruiting campaign. All Branches, save for the Navy, met, or surpassed their recruiting targets, and only around 7,000 prospective sailors did not report for morning rollcall. From the self-congratulatory comments of Dr. Katie Helland, Director of Military Accession Policy (Military Personnel Policy), it sounded as if the U.S. military had finally left the recruiting crisis in the rearview mirror for good. The lower collective recruiting goal of 227,090 (which the Services were also barely able to meet) was a primary reason for the success of the 2024 recruiting drive. Another celebrated key for the qualified success of the 2024 recruiting success was the adoption of the Future Soldier Preparatory Course by the Army in 2022 to help prospective recruits who test just below the enlistment standards to meet them (in a physical track and in an academic track respectively). This program brought many recruits to the Army, so much so that the Navy also adopted its own version a year later. Other not-so-celebrated practices, like the issuance of waivers to prospective recruits, also brought in more bodies.

With increasing commitments domestically and abroad – from natural disasters to renewed threats by Russia and China – having the necessary manpower is no small matter for the U.S. military. It is, in fact, central to the national security of the United States. These new strategic challenges have led the branches to set increased accession targets for the Active components of the Branches for FY 2025, in a way that will likely be reflected also in their Reserve components. Such higher recruiting goals threaten a repeat of the poor performances of the recruiting campaigns of 2022 and 2023.

The Recruiting Commands of the Army, Navy, Air and Space Forces, and the Marine Corps are responsible for conducting their recruiting efforts in a somewhat independent manner. As a result, they have made enormous efforts to entice young Americans to join up. In addition to the Future Soldier and Sailor Preparatory Courses, other planned efforts, such as an increased social media engagement, reliance on influencers, and good old-fashioned hiring of more recruiters, promise to tackle other causes of the recruiting crisis. Newly announced initiatives also include the addition of 14 health conditions (such as ADHD) to the 37 that already did not disqualify from service, as well as a pilot program to shift bureaucratic duties away from recruiters and allow them to dedicate more of their efforts to recruiting. All these, however, are partial and expensive coping strategies to reach an ever-shrinking recruitment base and convince it to enlist in the U.S. military. The services have not dealt with the deeper causes of the recruitment crisis in a way that is sustainable in the long term.

In fact, U.S. military recruitment requires a multi-pronged approach with the right amount of direction and autonomy. While the services have been able to design initiatives like the Future Soldier and Sailor Preparatory Programs that have proven quite effective in obtaining enough accessions, unclear and discontinuous leadership by the Department of Defense has prevented the Service-wide adoption of said programs and the capitalization on their effectiveness.

The lack of clear Department of Defense directives on social media engagement is a missed opportunity, since it deters the Branches from investing effort in platforms extremely popular among the young public, like Instagram and Snapchat. Likewise, by failing to take a clear stance on diversity, against discrimination, and how minorities, lesbian and gay service members are welcome in the U.S. military, the Department of Defense has discouraged them from offering their talents to the armed forces. Crucially, as indicated by Margaret D. Stock, institutional lethargy exacerbated by entrenched bureaucrats and uncertain leadership at the Office of the Under Secretary of Personnel and Readiness has also blocked the revision of harmful policies that prevent the branches from accessing significant sources of manpower. I refer in particular to Title 10, U.S.C. §504(b)(2), regulating enlistments in the U.S. military as amended in 2018 per request by the same OUSD (P&R) bureaucrats to make it impossible in practice for the branches to enlist skilled foreign nationals and DACA/DREAM recipients, individuals who grew up in the United States despite lacking U.S. citizenship or permanent residency.

What Needs to Happen

The next administration should therefore prioritize the nomination of a new Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness even if the title is not as glamorous as those of other, more well know Pentagon officials. Ensuring the ability of the U.S. armed forces to source adequate manpower is of crucial importance in view of increased commitments worldwide. Fresh leadership in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (P&R) is necessary to oversee a change in its staff, a revision of senseless policies that limit the recruiting ability by the U.S. military and the enlistment policy that regulates the recruiting efforts by the individual branches.

U.S. Army Rangers assigned to 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, fire off a AT-4 at a range on Camp Roberts, Calif., Jan 26, 2014. Rangers use a multitude of weaponry during their annual tactical training. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Rashene Mincy)

Competent guidance will be essential for navigating a challenging social and political environment and implementing effective recruiting measures guided by national interests rather than political partisanship and institutional conservatism.

Lastly, the next Under Secretary of Defense (P&R) will need to engage in honest conversations with policymakers about the domestic and global missions that the U.S. Armed Forces need to perform versus those that they have the ability to perform given the current manpower levels.

About the Author: Guido Rossi 

Guido Rossi (B.A. University of Milan, 2014; M.A. University of Southern Mississippi, 2017; Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 2023) is currently a Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute, University of South Florida. He is a trained military historian with interest in US military history particularly in its intersection with social and cultural history, history of immigration, race, ethnicity, and sense of national identity. At GNSI, Guido Rossi researches Civil-Military Relations for the U.S. military and its personnel policy. This first appeared in RealClearDefense.