Military Recruitment Success in 2024
Prep Courses, Policy Tweaks Largely Drove the Military’s Recruiting Success in 2024
By Konstantin Toropin , Steve Beynon , Drew F. Lawrence and Thomas Novelly
After years of negative recruiting news and headlines, all the military branches managed to eke out wins this year and meet their recruiting goals — largely aided by new programs and policies that allowed them to sign up recruits who would have been disqualified in previous years.
However, despite the wins this year, between ambitious goals for 2025 and deeper issues relating to Generation Z, the services may not be out of trouble yet.
The story of this year’s recruiting successes largely comes down to two broad changes that all the services made in some fashion — loosening the rules on who could join and increasing the number of recruiters.
Both the Army and Navy saw success this past year largely as a result of programs that were aimed squarely at allowing otherwise disqualified candidates to still sign up and join the service.
Giving credit where due, Big Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory Course approach seems to have merit. The two prep courses provide sub-standard applicants who cannot pass the ASVAB or are too overweight a path to serve. Selectees have 90 days to come into compliance with the Army standards and then can ship off to basic training. If they fail they go home and standards are maintained. Compare this to the Navy’s approach of opening the floodgates to Cat IV recruits, those in the lowest aptitude percentile allowed. As LPO I know which I’d rather have in my shop.
Category: Big Pentagon, The Stupid is Strong
Yup, we know how it goes…
Last year (2023) after a 20+ year grind my wife’s two sisters and their families emigrated (legally) to this country and settled here in Middle Georgia. At the time of their physical receipt of their green cards, the ages of the “children” were 20, 19, 17, and 11.
The 17 year old successfully graduated from High School here and turned 18 in May. I assisted in his signing up for Selective Service. He has expressed an interest in joining the Marine Corps. I’ve taken him to look around Parris Island.
One thing I noticed with all three older kids is that they are unfamiliar with US standardized tests. So we have our own little boot camp on those type tests, SAT, TEAS, AFQT, ASVAB, AFOQT, etc. They are all in good physical shape but the testing will be the hurdle they will have to meet.
How did your kid like PI?
Are Cat IV recruits like the Project 100,00 types of the Vietnam ere?
Don’t ask a question you already know the answer to.
Loosening the rules on who could join and increasing the number of recruiters.
And how about lowering target numbers.
And who wants to spend an additional fucking 90 days in a course and THEN go to OSUT?