US military recruiting off to a strong start in 2025

Bing AI image.

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