US military recruiting off to a strong start in 2025
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The U.S. military is looking at a strong year this year regarding recruiting. It is expected to beat 2024’s recruiting performance. Both the Army and the Navy, after facing recruiting challenges in recent years, described their recruiting pace as promising but neither identified the reason for these promising recruiting rates. The Navy said that it was too early in the year to make that call. The Army’s vice chief of staff described it as a momentum not experienced in a decade.
From ABC News:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said increased recruitments after President Donald Trump’s election were a reflection of a new mindset the Pentagon would promote to service members — a “warrior ethos” that Hegseth has said would focus away from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives he said were a distraction from a focus on military lethality.
“I think we’ve seen enthusiasm and excitement from young men and women who want to join the military actively because they are interested in being a part of the finest fighting force the world has to offer and not doing a lot of other things that serve oftentimes, too often, to divide or distract,” Hegseth said after becoming secretary.
At his confirmation hearing to be secretary, Hegseth said the military’s strongest recruiting asset was the commander in chief himself. “There is no better recruiter in my mind for our military than President Donald Trump,” he told senators.
One commanding general of recruitment, Air Force Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein, told ABC News that “there is no one silver bullet” for recruiting, but he said the Air Force had “honed in on the right ingredients, and they’re all working.”
Alex Wagner, a former senior Pentagon official in the Biden administration, said Hegseth’s conception of recruiting by promoting a warrior ethos amounted to “little more than a restatement, not even a rebranding, of existing efforts.”
Hegseth’s approach brings “nothing new of any substance,” said Wagner, who, as Air Force assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, was a civilian leader in recruiting.
“People want to come into the military for a number of reasons, but one of the key reasons is to be something bigger than yourself and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he added. “I think we’ve long been building a warrior ethos.”
In his address to a joint session of Congress earlier this month, Trump said the U.S. Army “had its single best recruiting month in 15 years.”
Additional Reading:
Boccia, C., Martinez, L., Seyler, M., & Pineda-Salgado, A. (2025, March 18). Military officials say recruiting off to strong start in 2025, building on recent trends. ABC News. Link.
Category: Military issues
Well, you’d think with all of the research and surveying the branches of the military do to increase their recruiting numbers, they’d have an idea about the reason of the record number of enlistments. Or they just don’t want to say.
Oh, we know why…
Tell that Wagner gut to “SUCK IT!” Nothing but sour grapes as he’s trying to take credit when the recruiting was in the shitter during the failed Biden Regime. Much like the Southern Border Crisis, its turns out all you needed to do have a new President to solve your recruiting woes. The SECDEF & POTUS torpedoed the DEI, CRT, and trans bullshit and poof! recruiting gets better. Who’d a thunk it possible? Anybody with a brain is who.
Alex Wagner may be working at All-Points Logistic in the very near future – if not already.
Maybe even showering with Phildo!
I wanna be all I can be!
Aim high.
And do more by 9am than most people do all day!
New ad today don’t this justice:
Doesn’t anybody want to be an Army of One?
Ask Lars, I think that got him going.
Today’s Army Wants to Join You!
Groovy, man!
Is that old dude fucking that specialist?
Impossible!
Such a thing is unacceptable!
It has never happened in the Army!
The “restatement” of warrior ethos comes with a caveat; that being “we mean it”.
Amazing what having a Republican in office can do.
This was my thought exactly.
But I was told that DEI was the cure, not the disease?
With the aberration of neocon George Bush Jr noted, the right tries their best to not get into wars, end them when possible and when war has to happen, make it firm, fast and decisive.
Don’t get into some bullshit war, with bullshit rules over some bullshit. Trump is bringing back the proper way to use the military.
Harry would agree.
I’m currently bouncing around in the back of an armored truck (down to four-day weeks but I hit 40 hours yesterday, so I’m not complaining), so I’ll keep this short.
Leadership up to and including (especially) the CinC is what motivates young men and women to join. That leadership is reflected in the motivation of rank-and-file Recruiters.
Anyway, enough trying to type on the phone. Forty stops and 1.6M to go…
“It is expected to beat 2024’s recruiting performance.”
No shit, Sherlock. with a bar as low as 2024’s recruiting numbers, beating that ain’t difficult to achieve.
Amazing what can happen when the lunatics are no longer running the asylum.
They didn’t say why, but we all know: the four-year (D)ebacle of failed leadership is over.
Maybe this had something to do with it?
Let’s make crazy, crazy again!
I attribute it to FINALLY weeding the extremists out of the ranks.
I spent 6 years spent as an Army recruiter after my initial 4 year term as a grunt humping a radio with the first 2 years in the 101st then going to Berlin and getting a secondary MOS and working as a Tactical Communications Chief in an Infantry company there the last 2 years before coming down on orders for Recruiting duty.
The first 3 years of recruiting I worked 4 rural high schools deep in the corn fields of Illinois west of Chicago. The main reason for many I enlisted was to see the world beyond the corn rows and getting a non-farming skill. I was able to make my mission and help the 4 others at my station working urban areas if they were falling short. My last 3 years was as a Guidance Counselor at the Chicago MEPS station closing the sale.
Following that, my last 14 years I was a Retention NCO in 3rd Infantry, 10th Mountain, 2nd Infantry, 7th Infantry and lastly I Corps at Ft Lewis.
Those of you who understand recruitment know this is a bullshit take sold to ABC by Hegseth.
First, 2024 numbers were up from 2023 which were up from 2022.
So recruitment was on an upward trend. Whether it was the end of the pandemic or the end of our war in Afghanistan that encouraged people to join is unclear. Probably a little of both.
The largest spike was in August, 2024, before the election. So nothing to do with Trump being anti-woke.
But that is because August is always high due to people joining after high school at the end of spending their last summer at home.
We also see spike after an election because many people like to wait to see the direction our foreign policy is headed. Trump has a reputation for being an anti-war president. So people who were willing to join but not eager to jump into a new war waited.
These 1st quarter numbers are not reflective of what we can expect to see moving forward now that Trump has revealed his idiotic foreign policy agenda.
My bet is recruitment is going to plummet moving forward.
You don’t know much about recruitment but you sure do excel at plummeting.
He could teach plummeting to Wile E. Coyote.