• Online Exclusive Article Archive

Turning a Pond into the Sea

Updating the Army’s Understanding of the Recruiting Information Environment to Expand the Pool of Potential Recruits

 

Max Z. Margulies, PhD
Maj. Andrew Webster, U.S. Army

 

Download the PDF

 

The goal of this article is to provide recommendations that will improve the Army’s ability to successfully recruit and retain high-quality soldiers. It focuses on the information environment through which the public understands the Army as a potentially attractive career option. The many variables that shape the public’s understanding of the Army as an employer—some of which the Army can affect more than others—interact with each other in subtle and complex ways that make it difficult to disentangle what policies can affect recruiting the most. Moreover, this information environment is often overlooked as a vital background condition with downstream consequences for the Army’s recruiting strategy and prospects. In short, whether the Army’s employment incentives and outreach strategy are successful depends entirely on how well the Army understands how people think about the Army.

A successful information environment strategy would ensure the Army meets its accession goals while minimizing its advertising and marketing costs. Traditionally, the Army has pursued this goal by targeting recruitment efforts at a relatively narrow subset of the population that it perceives as already viewing military service favorably; in other words, people whose prior beliefs about the military already make them likely to join. This means that they can be induced to enlist with relatively low cost and effort but also that they may have decided to join the military even without any recruiting efforts. This strategy also has major risks. It depends on a high success rate for converting leads into recruits, which leaves recruiting efforts vulnerable to small or sudden changes in how favorably people view the military relative to other employment prospects. It also assumes that the Army’s needs remain well-aligned with the skills and interests of the targeted population. A low-quality information environment increases the probability of recruiting failure through few people enlisting and the Army missing out on potential high-quality recruits.

This article proposes that the Army should understand and shape the information environment in a way that makes a larger portion of the population interested in joining. Historically, military recruitment strategies have not focused on maintaining or increasing willingness to serve across the American population.¹ Remedying this would create an information environment that requires a smaller proportion of those interested in enlisting to meet personnel requirements and successfully join the Army, allowing the Army to be more selective in choosing recruits and aligning them to current needs. Overall, a strong information environment strategy makes Army recruiting efforts easier regardless of the total number of uniformed service members it needs.

Given the challenges currently facing Army recruiting and a lack of emphasis on the recruiting information environment, how can the Army conceptualize this environment and what policy changes may be necessary to identify, communicate with, and expand the portion of the population who is interested in military service? This article offers a systematic way for the Army to both think about how to efficiently allocate resources to improve recruitment outcomes and identify the areas in which more research and data are necessary to adequately understand the problem. Its key goal is to demonstrate that the Army’s current approach may leave large segments of the population untapped as a recruitment resource while offering a framework for improving these segments’ access to information that aligns military service with their professional goals.

Problem Statement

While the Army met its recruiting goals in 2024 and announced higher targets for the next fiscal year, it is too soon to declare mission accomplished. It is still important to continually assess the efficiency of recruiting standards, policies, and procedures. The Army must plan ahead for future challenges and identify whether better recruiting outcomes are possible. There is good reason for the Army to avoid complacency in its recruitment mission: nearly 25 percent of the Army’s new recruits in 2024 went through pre-accession preparatory courses for soldiers who wanted to join but would not otherwise be eligible to enlist.² These programs are undoubtedly helping many people make valuable contributions to the military as new soldiers. However, the Army’s reliance on them may not be sustainable as lower ASVAB test scores are strongly correlated with lower job performance measures and higher separation rates. Despite significant investment in new marketing, it remains unclear to what extent the Army has been able to attract recruits beyond its traditional base of high school graduates. Without expanding the pool of people who are interested in joining, the Army remains vulnerable to recurrences of the conditions that caused the last recruitment crisis, when the Army missed its end-of-the-year goal by fifteen thousand in 2022 and by ten thousand in 2023 (see figure 1).³ Those recruitment shortfalls were, in fact, even greater than they appear on paper because each year, the Army adjusted its target downward due to force structure changes.

There are additional reasons to be concerned about the Army’s ability to attract new recruits. First, the Army is operating in a challenging environment for all employers, as the unemployment rate has been sustained at or below the natural rate of unemployment since February 2022, and there is little reason to anticipate the unemployment rate rising anytime soon.⁴ Second, for years the Army relied on the Delayed Entry Program (DEP) to makeup a portion of its recruiting shortfalls. By 2011, the Great Recession created a robust DEP of over thirty-three thousand recruits, or 58 percent of its fiscal year 2012 mission.⁵ For years, this enabled the Army to draw on the DEP’s previous fiscal year contracts to meet its accessions goals when current year new contracts fell short. Without the DEP personnel, the Army would have missed missions in nine of the last eleven years and was 5 percent short of its aggregate contracting goal (see figure 2). The Army’s reliance on DEP to make mission drained this long-standing reservoir, entering the 2024 fiscal year with only 4,600 personnel in reserve (see figure 3).⁶ This demonstrates that the recruitment challenge predates the shortfall of the last two years and that there is a clear need to change the Army’s overall structural approach to recruiting.

Third, this decrease in recruited personnel comes at a time when, from a purely demographic perspective, the recruiting mission should be easier than ever before: the Army today is trying to recruit fewer people from a much larger pool of young adults. Even if we assume that current eligibility requirements are appropriate and operationally necessary and that only 23 percent of the thirty plus million 17–24-year-old Americans can meet them, as is often reported, that still results in a target recruitment rate of 0.8 percent of the population; identical to what it was at the dawn of the all-volunteer force.⁷

Together, these observations suggest that the Army may continue to face a recruitment problem that is partially self-imposed. Why? Are fewer people interested in joining the military? Are people interested in joining but unable to meet the accession standards? Are people eligible to join even considering the military as an option? An efficient recruitment strategy requires answers to these questions; without clear answers, it is impossible to know whether efforts like revitalizing the recruiter workforce and updating accessions processes and standards will have a significant, lasting effect on recruitment outcomes—let alone the most effective ways to make these changes.

This article provides a framework for answering these questions through the concept of the Army’s value proposition, which views the Army as an employer in competition with private firms and other public entities in a marketplace to attract employees. Civilians will choose the option that gives them the greatest value, or utility, at a better price than other options. In other words, recruits are employees who need to be interested in what employers like the Army are offering.

The extent of an individual’s interest in an employer’s value proposition depends on what they know (or think they know) about the company. Potential employees evaluate the organization’s terms of service, including quality of life, compensation, and future career progression/prospects, with their expectation of its ability to fulfill their personal/professional goals and self-fulfillment relative to their job opportunities in the civilian sector. These are the underlying factors that contribute to how many people consider the Army an attractive career choice. However, accurate information about the Army is not distributed equally across American society. Even if it is accurate, information that creates a positive value proposition for some individuals may not resonate with others. This creates variation in individuals’ willingness to serve (WTS) within any information environment. Importantly, people across the WTS continuum can contribute successfully to and thrive in the military, but only high WTS individuals will actively try to join. WTS can change over time if people are presented with new information or life situations.

An emphasis on increasing WTS has advantages over the traditional approach to thinking about propensity, which focuses on sixteen-to-twenty-one year olds’ self-assessment of the probability that they will serve in the military within the next few years. In fact, most people who enlist in the military did not have a high propensity to serve when originally polled.⁸ More efficient, less costly recruitment efforts must increase the size of the easily accessible recruitment pool by communicating the Army’s value proposition to people who could contribute and would want to contribute if they knew what the Army could offer them. Yet this is not only about getting the Army’s message out to more people; it also requires a reexamination of what that message is and how to align it to both the needs of the Army and the interests of individuals—especially low WTS individuals who may not otherwise seek out information that might improve their view of military service—who have skills the Army needs. Our approach to the recruitment problem assumes that there is a large enough portion of the population able to contribute to the military and for whom military service already would provide an attractive value proposition. In fact, military compensation is well above the 70th percentile of civilian compensation for comparably educated and experienced individuals.⁹ The problem in this case is that this portion of the population does not have enough information—whether about that compensation or other possible benefits of military service—to assess the military’s value proposition completely.

The information environment is not the only factor that determines the Army’s success in recruitment. Individuals must still be able to convert potential service into actual service by signing a contract, meeting service qualifications, and in-processing at a Military Entrance Processing Station. However, the larger the share of the population who has correct information about the Army’s value proposition, the more efficient Army recruiting should be. While Army recruiters have a role in shaping the population’s understanding of the Army’s value proposition, and a vital role in validating potential recruits’ perceptions, they are only one component of a complex information environment. People develop perceptions about the Army’s value proposition, accurate or not, long before they ever encounter a recruiter, if they even encounter one. The Army must design its recruiting efforts with an understanding of the information environment that shapes individuals’ baseline perception of the Army’s value proposition. The factors that define this information environment affect both the likelihood that any individual will seek out additional information about the Army from a recruiter in the first place and how receptive they are to Army recruiting efforts.

Thus, this analysis complements the recent and ongoing structural changes that will modernize and improve how the U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) and other accession enterprises direct and manage their workforce.¹⁰ The Army’s new approach to recruiting consists of five changes that will alter who is recruited, who does the recruiting, and how the Army’s recruiting enterprise is structured. These five changes are expanding the market for recruits based on the changing employment decisions of young adults, creating a permanent and specialized recruiter workforce, developing an innovation office within USAREC, using econometric analysis to assess recruiting techniques, and changing the organizational structure and leadership roles and responsibilities for USAREC.

If properly implemented, these five changes are a significant step in the correct direction. The Army must recruit young adults where they are making occupational decisions, which is not solely at the end of high school. The Army also needs a more deliberate approach to identifying and selecting personnel who will likely succeed as recruiters and put more investment in them. Additionally, the development of an innovation office and the use of econometric analysis to identify the most effective recruiting techniques can also support a research agenda that will enable a better understanding of the information environment.

This article builds on these reforms by arguing that a better understanding of the information environment, and the Army’s role in shaping it, will amplify their effect on these organizations’ internal functioning. A firm grasp of the information environment would enable the recruiting enterprise to adopt policies and develop a messaging strategy that resonates more strongly with a larger portion of its target population, increasing peoples’ WTS and the overall number of people who choose the Army as their employer. Thus, a better understanding of the information environment will improve recruiting and retention outcomes in general. It is an important goal even when the Army is not struggling to reach its recruitment targets.

Components of the Information Environment

The Army’s goal should be to foster an information environment that maximizes the number of people who can both contribute to the Army and have a sufficiently high WTS to sign a contract while minimizing cost. This requires, at a minimum, that individuals are willing to make initial contact with a recruiter, whether through clicking a link on a website, stopping by a recruiting office or static display, or responding to a recruiter’s message or overture. Whether any individual reaches this point depends almost entirely on their information environment. They must have enough information from sources they trust that depicts the military as a possible employer. The content of the information about the Army’s value proposition is important. However, information can come from a variety of sources. Not only might different sources provide different information, but the content of information from different sources may also be inconsistent. People are exposed to the Army through friends and family, news and social media, pop culture, and direct marketing campaigns. However, people vary with respect to their levels of exposure to each and how much they trust different types of sources.

In other words, the information environment is defined by how much information people are exposed to (the information environment’s impressions), the extent to which they trust and value the source of the information, and the extent to which the information’s content conveys an attractive value proposition. The Army should strive to saturate the information environment with trustworthy impressions but also to enable more targeted recruiting efforts by identifying major differences across demographic groups concerning what sources are persuasive or trustworthy and what content is appealing. This information should also be accurate or else time and effort is wasted on enticing recruits who will walk away from the Army once they talk to a recruiter.

Impressions. Impressions are the instances in which individuals are exposed to information about the military. People glean information about the Army from social interactions with, and observations of, people who know more about it than they do. Exposure to this information can come through active efforts to relay information to particular people and groups, or it can be absorbed more passively, through the degree to which people pay attention—consciously or subconsciously—to depictions of the Army throughout society. A military that is more integrated within society will have more frequent, qualitative interactions with the population, resulting in potential recruits having more and better information.

As indicated above, these interactions can come in many forms. Family, friends, and other social relationships may provide the first avenue for people to learn about the military in the greatest detail. Research has repeatedly found that these close connections play an important role in military recruitment.¹¹ When it comes to opportunities to challenge preconceived notions and learn answers to questions, there is no substitute for conversations, especially in person.¹² This is why the Army has relied on face-to-face meetings with recruiters to finalize enlistment contracts. These interpersonal interactions can range from close relationships with people who serve or served to casual encounters with veterans, service members, or even just people who appear to have experience with the military.

Of course, interactions with family, friends, and colleagues are likely to be much more frequent and involved than more casual or random interactions. Nonetheless, in general, society will be more saturated with opportunities for information gathering when the military is larger, when service members and veterans spend more time living and working in and among civilians, and when the military features prominently in local or national society and culture.

A second source of information about the military comes from news media, whether consumed traditionally or through social media platforms. While social relationships are largely defined by personal and professional networks that are often geographically constrained, news media has unlimited reach. Individuals can access information related to the military through local, national, and international outlets, which they then consume through television, radio, print, and online platforms. There may be extensive variation in both the amount of military-related news and the content of the news across these outlets. Because people select what media to consume, including the extent to which they seek out or avoid media that covers military issues, this is not necessarily a consistent source of impressions. However, news about major events that might affect people’s perceptions of the military, like some scandals or military operations, will nonetheless reach people, whether through public broadcasts or ambient reporting.

References to the military in pop culture offer a third way of learning about the military, albeit one that is more focused on entertainment than providing facts. Like news media, pop culture is a source of information that is pervasive, despite the individual’s ability to pick and choose how much and what to consume. Television shows, movies, video games, music, and even sports events can all offer depictions of life in the military that make its value proposition more or less attractive.

For each of these types of sources, the density of the impressions varies as a result of processes or events largely, if not exclusively, outside the Army’s control. For example, the location and density of Army bases across the country should affect impressions in a number of ways. People living near Army bases may have more opportunities to interact with people who can share personal information about life in the Army. Communities around Army bases may also have more news or social media coverage related to the Army. Yet, basing decisions are years in the making, and are fundamentally up to Congress. Similarly, media coverage of topics that affect how people think of the costs and benefits of a career in the Army may be driven by foreign policy or international events that are completely exogenous to Army policy.

There are still ways the Army can improve its impressions. While it does not have control over how many bases it has or where they are, it does have control over how isolated these bases are from the communities in which they are located. It cannot control how often the media wants to cover stories related to the Army, but it can create more opportunities for media-Army interaction through robust public affairs operations. Similarly, the Army may want to consider whether it wants to increase its representation in pop culture outlets like film and video games through increased access to developers. Most importantly, there is a need to identify ways the Army can shape the information environment, what ways it cannot, and which of these can have the biggest impact on recruitment.

There is a final source of impressions over which the Army does have direct control: its marketing strategy. This encompasses the full array of mechanisms through which the Army tries to communicate its value proposition to the public. While marketing can shape perceptions of the military indirectly by providing information to family, friends, and other trusted individuals, the most direct effect is on the consumer themselves. Consequently, it is important to assess what media formats reach the target population most effectively. The Army can directly control the message it sends to potential recruits about its value proposition through television, film, and social media/online advertisements. The goal of these advertisements is to convince people of the Army’s value proposition enough to get them to go to a recruiting office, or at least to visit GoArmy.com, where they can learn more and hopefully become a recruiting lead. As a result, the Army must also think carefully about its branding in those venues too.

In short, impressions determine how accessible information about the military is for the general population or for specific target populations. Impressions can come from many sources, some of which the Army can influence more than others. To the extent that part of the recruitment problem is due to people not knowing or thinking enough about the military as a potential career option, it is important to evaluate the many different policy tools that can increase people’s access to information.

Trust. While there are many avenues through which people can learn about the military, they are not necessarily equally effective. Information coming straight from Army marketing is likely to be the most accurate, while depictions in pop culture may be less so. Even more importantly, people find some sources of information more trustworthy than others. This is important because people are more likely both to seek out and be persuaded by trustworthy sources. If people do not believe or do not think they would believe information coming from certain types of sources, they will not only avoid those sources but also discount any information they do learn from it. Thus, large numbers of impressions can actually be counterproductive if they do not come from trustworthy sources.

For example, some people may prefer to get information about the military from family and friends. They trust people they know personally, regardless of how knowledgeable those people actually are. To get these people to consider the Army’s value proposition seriously, their communities must view the Army positively (and accurately) as a career option. Support from trusted authority figures and confidants will get people into a recruiting office, even if other sources of information like Army advertisements or news reports do not communicate an attractive value proposition. However, high reliance on interpersonal relationships as a trustworthy source of information for potentially high WTS leads also requires understanding where their sources get their information. Furthermore, some people may only value information that comes directly from the source, such as Army recruitment materials on websites like GoArmy.com. This speaks to the need to not only understand the information environment in terms of the sources of impressions but also whether different target populations trust some sources more than others.

Thus, there can be a disconnect between what information is available and the persuasive power of that information. For example, a military that is small, homogenous, and isolated from large parts of society—in other words, one that is providing few impressions—can still be a trustworthy source of information to those who come into contact with it. Indeed, there is strong evidence that having family connections to the military greatly increases the probability of someone enlisting, as is true of other professions. One-in-four new recruits have a parent who served, and three-in-four have a relative who served.¹³ The tendency for children to follow their parents into their service shows that those with the greatest knowledge of the Army’s value proposition recognize its value and see it as a credible career option. It suggests that these interpersonal relationships are a highly trusted source of positive value-proposition information among the Army’s current population of recruits. However, relying primarily on such interpersonal connections as a trustworthy source of information can also be a disadvantage as it can limit the size of the population who wants to join the military to those who know people who currently or recently served.

There may also be highly desirable recruitment populations that find other sources of information sufficiently trustworthy. If that is the case, then limited or negative exposure to the military may not be an obstacle to recruitment, as long as people have other trusted sources of impressions. Furthermore, diversifying efforts to identify and broaden the reach of different types of trustworthy information increases the potential pool of recruits to draw upon. It is important to make sure that information about the military is readily available in a format that people trust.

Content. Finally, different impressions and sources may promote different pictures of the Army’s value proposition. Available, trustworthy information must still appeal to what people hope to achieve from their time in the military. While ultimately the hard sell will come from a recruiter, the information environment conveys images or ideas of Army service that can lead to an individual’s interest in meeting with a recruiter in the first place. After all, it is not costless for people to meet with a recruiter. They may face social and financial costs, like time off work or difficult conversations with family members. They will not contact a recruiter unless their image of military service suggests that it might offer a competitive value proposition. Therefore, the content of trustworthy impressions is equally pertinent. Content is information about what service potentially looks like and directly impacts what potential recruits assess about the value proposition of service because it communicates images, whether accurate or not, about what potential recruits can expect about the Army’s ability to meet their financial, professional, and personal goals.

A variety of factors can define an individual’s value proposition preferences. Broadly speaking, when looking for a job, individuals may consider what it offers them in terms of financial compensation and stability, workplace culture/quality and work-life balance, and self-actualization or personal fulfillment. Individuals have ideal points for each of these three categories but weigh the importance of each differently. Someone who is highly motivated by financial compensation may be willing to take a very well-paid job with good benefits even if it offers less satisfaction on work-life balance and personal fulfillment. Conversely, individuals may accept jobs that do not satisfy their financial goals if they believe the job will offer them sufficient personal fulfillment or work-life balance to offset those costs. Research into motivations and determinants of military recruitment similarly find that people must believe they can perform the requirements of the job and that, regardless of what they want to achieve, the military can help them do it more than the civilian sector can.¹⁴

This points to two critical questions for recruiting efforts. First, what do people currently perceive as the Army’s value proposition? Second, to what extent are popular perceptions of the Army’s value proposition consistent with how the Army wants to portray itself? The Army is a vast institution. The diversity of missions and job opportunities in the Army should provide competitive value propositions across a variety of professional and personal considerations. In fact, while efforts to improve recruitment often focus on financial incentives, many recruits may be more motivated by quality of life considerations like proximity to family or intrinsic motivations like a commitment to leadership and service.¹⁵ While the Pentagon’s internal polling organization, the Joint Advertising Market Research and Studies, finds that the top two reasons American youth would consider joining the military are based on pay and educational incentives, this does not take into consideration the motivations of people who actually do end up joining.¹⁶ It could be the case that these extrinsic motivations are most important but only for people who are unlikely to join the military anyway. Indeed, if financial motivations were a key incentive we might expect most recruits to come from low-income segments of the population, which is not the case.¹⁷

Furthermore, as mentioned above, financial compensation packages are stronger than commonly recognized. The Army offers entry-level wage and benefit packages that are competitive with civilian employers for its potential population. A private first class with less than two years of service earns a total military compensation that exceeds the 80th percentile of civilian wages when adjusted for education and age. But the Army’s value proposition is not just competitive for noncollege bound young adults.¹⁸ A college graduate can enlist as a specialist, earn an E-4 pay and benefits package in excess of $60,000, which is comparable with the average college graduate’s starting salary.¹⁹ The Army’s compensation package could be exceptionally appealing to the 38 percent of college graduates that are underemployed.²⁰ In addition to income, there are a multitude of other benefits that add to the Army’s value proposition to include college tuition with the GI Bill, 5 percent investment matching in the Thrift Savings Plan, a lifetime pension for twenty years of service, healthcare, disability pay, housing allowance, and more.²¹ These benefits ensure service members are positioned for successful transitions out of the military whether after four, eight, twenty, or forty years. In short, the Army likely does not need to increase the compensation structure, but it may need to communicate those benefits more effectively.

Additionally, military service often results in high levels of job satisfaction and personal goal achievement.²² While there are always exceptions, the camaraderie and purpose found through national service is demonstrated by the affiliation most veterans have with the military and which alternative employment options often lack. The trade-off of this purpose and camaraderie is the Army does not offer as much autonomy and work-life balance as private employers offer. For important reasons, service members sacrifice many privileges such as selecting where they live, what their work hours are, and the risks associated with military service. The Army’s lack of autonomy may be an enduring challenge as Generation Z tends to have a strong preference for work flexibility and personal agency. However, there may be incentives tied to other value propositions to compensate for this trade-off without harming the military mission.

Access to firsthand information about the Army’s various value propositions may be one reason why knowing people who serve can be such a persuasive source of information. However, for the reasons described during the discussion of impressions and trust, an overreliance on recent service members to share diverse content about military careers unnecessarily limits the recruiting pool. It is important to consider how multiple depictions of the military in media and popular culture may also provide informed content about military careers and what content Army direct marketing campaigns communicate.

People pursue military service for different reasons. It is important to identify the full range of value proposition preferences that the Army can meet, what segments of the population those value propositions are concentrated in, and how to communicate to those segments of the population. The Army should not write off any segment as too difficult to recruit simply because it is small or has low initial WTS. Instead, it must continue to improve its ability to recognize the talents that individuals have and seek to place them where they are best fitted. There are two critical reasons for this. First, young Americans are receiving more specialization training and at younger ages than previous generations had the opportunity to and therefore have less homogenous skillsets. Second, the ongoing Army modernization efforts and the changing character of war dictate that tomorrow’s service members will work in more complex environments with a greater reliance on technology. Therefore, the Army needs to bring in recruits that are more educated and have more skills than previous generations. These groups may seek value propositions that are different from those that the Army has traditionally emphasized. As long as population segments contain sufficient numbers of people who have skills the Army needs, the Army should consider how to best align and communicate its value proposition for each segment within their information environment.

There is a risk here that investing too much in one type of content might reduce the WTS of desirable people who want different content. Similarly, people may respond negatively if information is delivered in a form they do not trust, even if it is accurate. The Army must strive to understand how it can communicate information in a way that attracts people with diverse talents and does not alienate any segments that provide vital skillsets. However, this speaks to the importance of carefully and deliberately considering the Army’s needs and how to design a marketing strategy appropriately. The Army has a competitive value proposition for many young adults. What would benefit the Army the most is a deliberate realignment of the delivery of this value proposition at the right place and time to the populations the Army needs to fill its ranks.

Where Does the Army Go from Here?

We previously outlined how the Army should think about efforts to communicate its value proposition to the rest of the population. Framing the recruiting problem through an information environment network offers a structure for thinking about how the Army can get its messages out to the public. Importantly, people vary with respect to how much and what type of information they need to decide to join the military, but Army policies can increase the size of the population who would consider joining the military by ensuring that trustworthy impressions reach desirable recruits and meet their value propositions. Some segments of the population do not have access to accurate information about the military that would increase their WTS, while others have access to inaccurate information. Communicating to segments that have accurate information, have low WTS, and for whom additional information would not increase their WTS would be a waste of resources. So would communicating to segments that have accurate information and already have high WTS. A key goal should be identifying what segments of the population could have higher WTS, if they had more trustworthy impressions about the military whose content accurately reflects their value proposition. A better understanding of how the information environment affects potential recruits’ value proposition assessments will enable the military to invest resources more wisely.

The announcement that USAREC will expand its traditional target populations supports this conclusion.²³ Since the advent of the all-volunteer force, the Army has primarily focused on hiring the same target demographic: high school graduates who are not immediately college bound. As a result, over 80 percent of new recruits have a high school degree but no college education, and less than 6 percent of recruits have a college degree. This is a clear misalignment with the current, and likely future, young adult population; over 60 percent of recent high school graduates are college bound.²⁴ This implies that the Army has been self-selecting away from a large portion of the young adult population. The Army is correct to shift its recruitment focus away from being primarily high school focused. Such a shift in its recruitment target population should make recruitment easier by expanding the pool of potential recruits and reorienting its efforts toward shaping the information environment at the time and place where young adults are making their career decisions.

However, USAREC will also need to rethink its approach to the information environment to ensure it understands how college-educated populations assess the Army’s value proposition. Two years of accessions shortfall and a decade of recruitment shortfalls clearly indicates a misalignment between the Army’s recent recruiting strategy and young adult work and education preferences. Only with a more detailed understanding of the information environment, in terms of knowing who wants what out of an employer and what they know about the Army’s ability to provide it, can the Army identify why and where that misalignment is occurring. At the same time, the Army should not overcorrect by shifting exclusively to college campuses and later points in life, but rather become more in line with today’s ratio of approximately 40 percent high school and 60 percent with some college education. While more young adults are pursuing additional education out of high school, there is still a portion of the population who prefers to enter the workforce than continue schooling. Moreover, it is important for the Army to consider that if these different populations have their own distinct value proposition preferences, then they may also have skills that are best suited to different career fields in the Army. It is not just about recruiting enough people but recruiting them into the right roles.

The problem, therefore, likely lies in the discrepancy between what the public thinks about the Army’s value propositions and what the Army can or could offer. As we have argued in this article, this discrepancy may be the result of several factors. It could be that the Army has poorly articulated the scope of its value proposition. This would require the Army to reconsider how necessary its terms of service, or messaging about its terms of service, are for its modern mission, because people who could contribute quite effectively to the military may be unwittingly excluding themselves or are accidentally being excluded by the Army from consideration. This is primarily a problem about information content. Alternatively, it could be that the Army has an appropriately defined set of value propositions that it accurately portrays in its advertising campaigns, but it lacks sufficient agency within the information environment relative to other sources of information that portray different conceptualizations of the Army’s value propositions. In this case, it would be important for the Army to identify how to compete with alternative sources of information more successfully. This is primarily a problem about impressions and trust. Below, we provide policy recommendations to help the Army understand how to best communicate its value proposition to all people for whom the Army could be an attractive employment option. These recommendations should expand the size of the population who might view the Army’s value proposition favorably.

The Army needs to increase the frequency of high-value impressions across the American population. Many young Americans never consider military service as an option because they do not know enough about it, especially when they do not know anyone in the military nor are they near a military base. This is an unfortunate byproduct of the downsizing of the military and the multiple iterations of Base Realignment and Closure over the last few decades, which has resulted in many people living far away from military bases and not having close relationships with people in the military. While the military cannot alter these structural changes, the military has done little to make itself more accessible to and understood by society. If anything, the military has made itself more secluded in the post-9/11 era by restricting public access to military bases. In addition to needing more accessibility, the Army should be more transparent about what military service looks like. Importantly, the answer here is not more opportunities for superficial exposure to the military through flyovers and “salute the troops” style events. The public needs access to realistic information and portrayals of life in the military across a variety of career fields. This would help dispel preconceptions about the challenges of military service that allow them to make more informed comparisons to the opportunities they have in civilian positions.

The Army needs to tell its story through effective modes of communication that young generations trust. The Army offers an appealing value proposition both in terms of financial compensation and benefits as well as meaningful work, camaraderie, and personal development. However, it does not always communicate its message in ways that reach and persuade the intended audience. First, discussions of Regular Military Compensation are onerous and complex with various components such as base pay, housing allowance, subsistence allowance, tax advantages, etc. Graphics and charts should be used to summarize and simplify compensation packages. Additionally, the Army should not be hesitant to explicitly compare its offerings to civilian alternatives. Second, the Army has primarily relied on face-to-face recruiter interactions with potential recruits. While these practices should continue, the Army must also look at modernizing where the Army is interacting with potential recruits. The Army must be present where young adults are making occupational decisions if it wants to be competitive in today’s labor market. This includes college campuses, job fairs, and digital employment domains such as LinkedIn. In addition to increasing the population the Army can reach, it will also connect the Army with more educated and skilled enlistees that can provide more immediate benefits to the Army. The Army needs to recognize that the ways it used to communicate may no longer be effective, and also that different segments of the population trust different modes of communication.

The Army must redefine and communicate its value proposition for twenty-first-century talent requirements and opportunities. While the Army is still centered around combat-arms jobs such as infantry and field artillery, it is becoming increasingly technologically driven with new jobs arising such as cyber analysts, drone operators, and air defense artillery. These wide-ranging career fields appeal to different types of recruits and segments of the population who can all bring value to tomorrow’s Army. Rather than market toward the segments of the population who are most likely to already think their goals and values align with the Army, the Army should try to appeal to as many segments of the population as possible. People look for many different things in their careers, and the Army can fulfill many, if not all, of these needs. This means not only relying on intrinsic motivations like, patriotism, service to country, and desire for adventure and challenge but also leaning into other incentives and personal development goals. This can include recruiting people with civilian work experience and skills in areas critical to the Army’s mission at different life stages. This may require creating more advanced lateral entry opportunities for these people to enter the enlisted ranks at a higher rank, which would include compensation packages commensurate with the higher level of skills they possess. To facilitate this, the Army could bring back the expanded specialist rating system. This would allow the Army to recruit technically trained civilians and enter them into the Army at the appropriate pay grade for their skillset without requiring the individual to be steeped in the knowledge required to be a noncommissioned officer.

The Army must update its incentive structure to compete in today’s labor market. While the Army offers attractive financial incentives that are competitive with comparable civilian career opportunities, there are ways to make them more appealing to a broader segment of the population. For example, as most young adults are going directly to college, the Army should consider incentives such as student loan repayment or pre-enlistment education funding as an alternative to the GI Bill. The Army currently offers college loan repayment but only on federal loans and only to potential recruits who are current on their loans. Adjusting or relaxing these requirements would allow more people to serve in exchange for loan repayment. The Army could also capitalize on young adults’ desire to attend college by funding associate degrees at community colleges. This is a relatively inexpensive proposition that would provide recruits with a lifetime of higher earnings potential and will also enable the Army to bring in more educated and mature recruits. Beyond financial compensation, the Army should also consider the extent to which new recruits’ value proposition preferences are informed by less quantifiable considerations like work-life balance, proximity to family, and autonomy. While the operational demands of military service may still impose limits on what the Army can offer, it is worth examining the extent to which the Army can be more flexible in its policies about duty station assignments. For example, the Army can reduce or alter its permanent change of station (PCS) cycle to the preferences of both recruits and service members. Instead of dictating that a service member must PCS every three or so years, the Army can shift to a model where soldiers can opt into PCS cycles when they want to move or can stabilize for longer periods if the Army is sustaining its personnel requirements across duty stations.

The Army must advocate for, support, and advertise the findings of a holistic reassessment of criteria and conditions for enlistment. The demands of warfare have changed, reducing requirements for physical presence on the frontline of the battlefield. While some enlistment criteria are necessary for the job, others are remnants from previous eras that no longer contribute to military effectiveness or for which there are readily available solutions or treatments. There are still other conditions that are readily treated or waiverable if they develop or are discovered after enlisting. As a result, potential recruits are considered disqualified for a range of factors that may not truly prevent them from serving honorably. Many of these potential recruits eventually receive waivers, after significant work from recruiters and/or Military Entrance Processing Station personnel. Yet, this is not just a matter of providing medical waivers on an ad hoc basis when necessary; what people think they know about criteria for enlistment affects whether they view themselves as possible candidates in the first place. People who think a preexisting condition will prevent them from enlisting will be less likely to even try to enlist, even if waivers for that condition happen to be common. Similarly, many people may not want to go a year without treatment to be eligible with their condition, and the ability to receive treatment again after enlisting only reinforces the unattractive image of the Army as an arbitrary and intransigent bureaucracy. A holistic review of all disqualifying conditions, to include the propensity for waivers to be granted, should be conducted and a new set of standards should be established that are both relevant for military operations in the twenty-first century and for American culture. Finally, these reviews and standards must be conducted and communicated in a way that clearly establishes them not as lowering standards but rather as updating them.

The Army needs to reduce the barriers to enter into military service. Prolonged wait times for medical screening, contracting, and starting basic training, coupled with lack of access to recruiters in many parts of the country, create strong opportunity costs that can reduce individuals’ willingness to serve. Especially during periods where the civilian economy is robust and offers many competitive alternatives to military services, potential recruits may choose not to begin the recruitment process because it would require foregoing other job opportunities. They may also remove themselves from the process while waiting for a contract because another opportunity presented itself. The prospect of making a substantial investment, in both time and foregone earnings, only to join the military and learn soon after that it is not for them, may also deter people from seeking out additional information about service. The Army should explore ways to reduce these barriers through alternative ways to develop and sign contracts, schedule their medical evaluations, and make initial enlistments that might expose people to the military without the traditional lengthy and disruptive commitments.

Action is clearly required based on both the recent shortfalls in recruitment numbers and the structural changes to the recruiting environment discussed above. The Army must recognize what things have changed that it cannot control, such as the increase in college attendance for high school graduates, and which things it can control, such as how the Army’s recruiting enterprise is structured and where and how the Army engages with young Americans.

Our framework for examining the information environment through the lenses of impressions, trust, and content offers a useful guide in each of these areas. It contributes to a more fine-tuned understanding of where the gap between the Army’s value proposition and public perception exists and why. Each recruit brings value to the Army along with their different goals and skill sets, but the Army must make sure its message reaches all of them effectively. The Army must shape the information by understanding that talent matters, people respond to incentives, and the traditional strategy for communicating and aligning incentives to necessary talents is no longer sufficient.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not represent those of the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

---

Notes

1. Paul R. Sackett and Anne S. Mavor, eds., Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth: Implications for Military Recruitment (National Academies Press, 2003).
2. Konstantin Toropin et al., “Prep Courses, Policy Tweaks Largely Drove the Military’s Recruiting Success in 2024,” Military.com, 10 October 2024, https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/10/prep-courses-policy-tweaks-largely-drove-militarys-recruiting-success-2024.html.
3. Sam Skove, “Army Recruiting on Pace to Hit Goal—and Break a Years-Long Streak,” DefenseOne, 16 April 2024, https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2024/04/army-pace-hit-recruiting-goal-year-wormuth-says/395777/.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rate,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, last updated 7 March 2025, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE; “Number of Unemployed Persons per Job Opening, Seasonally Adjusted,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed 13 March 2025, https://www.bls.gov/charts/job-openings-and-labor-turnover/unemp-per-job-opening.htm.
5. Jeff Peterson, Jared Huff, and Aline Quester, The Role of the Delayed Entry Program in Recruiting the All-Volunteer Force (Center for Naval Analyses, October 2013), https://www.cna.org/archive/CNA_Files/pdf/drm-2013-u-005418-final.pdf.
6. Ashley Roque, “New Army Chief: Looming Force Structure Shakeups and New Weapons – Army 2023 in Review,” Breaking Defense, 21 December 2023, https://breakingdefense.com/2023/12/new-army-chief-looming-force-structure-shakeups-and-new-weapons-army-2023-in-review/.
7. Jeremy Hall and Katherine Helland, Qualified Military Available (QMA) Technical Report, OPA Report No. 2022-085 (Office of People Analytics [OPA], March 2022), https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Personnel_Related/23-F-1060_QMA_Technical_Report_Mar_2022.pdf.
8. “The Target Population for Military Recruitment: Youth Eligible to Enlist Without a Waiver,” PowerPoint presentation, Office of People Analytics, 25 May 2023, https://dacowits.defense.gov/Portals/48/Documents/General%20Documents/RFI%20Docs/June2023/OPA%20RFI%201.pdf?ver=BtY_S_YG5iKf9eAwGZbzzg%3D%3D.
9. Lawrence Kapp and Barbara Salazar Torreon, Military Pay: Key Questions and Answers, CRS Report RL33446 (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 17 July 2020), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33446.
10. U.S. Army Public Affairs, “Army Announces Transformation of Its Recruiting Enterprise,” Army.mil, 3 October 2023, https://www.army.mil/article/270458/army_announces_transformation_of_its_recruiting_enterprise.
11. Paul R. Sackett and Anne S. Mavor, eds., Evaluating Military Advertising and Recruiting: Theory and Practice (National Academies Press, 2004), 65.
12. Joshua L. Kalla and David E. Broockman, “Voter Outreach Campaigns Can Reduce Affective Polarization Among Implementing Political Activists: Evidence from Inside Three Campaigns,” American Political Science Review 116, no. 4 (2022): 1516–22, https://doi-org.usmalibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.1017/S0003055422000132.
13. Amy Schafer, Generations of War: The Rise of the Warrior Caste and the All-Volunteer Force (Center for a New American Security, 2024), https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/generations-of-war.
14. Sackett and Mavor, Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Aspirations of American Youth: Implications for Military Recruitment.
15. Ibid., 202–3; Wen Cheng Fu, “Persuasive Strategies of the United States Military Television Recruitment Advertising During the All-Volunteer Force Era” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013).
16. “Public Release Spring 2023 Propensity Update: Youth Poll Study Findings,” PowerPoint presentation, Office of People Analytics, 25 May 2023, https://jamrs.defense.gov/Portals/20/Documents/YP55Spring2023PUBLICRELEASEPropensityUpdate_20231218_Final.pdf.
17. Andrea Asoni et al., “A Mercenary Army of the Poor? Technological Change and the Demographic Composition of the Post-9/11 U.S. Military,” Journal of Strategic Studies 45, no. 4 (2022): 468–614, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2019.1692660; Susan Payne Carter, Alexander A. Smith, and Carl Wojtaszek, “Who Will Fight? The All-Volunteer Army After 9/11,” American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 107, no. 5 (May 2017): 415–19, https://www.doi.org/10.1257/aer.p20171082.
18. Kristy N. Kamarck, The U.S. Military’s Force Structure: A Primer, CRS Report R46983 (CRS, 12 January 2022), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46983.
19. “Regular Military Compensation (RMC) Calculator,” Military Compensation, accessed 13 March 2025, https://militarypay.defense.gov/calculators/rmc-calculator/; Heidi Rivera and Pippin Wilbers, “Average College Graduate Salaries: 2024 Projections,” Bankrate, 17 May 2024, https://www.bankrate.com/loans/student-loans/average-college-graduate-salary/.
20. Statista Research Department, “Share of Recent U.S. College Graduates Who Are Underemployed from 1990 to 2021,” Statista, 27 August 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/642037/share-of-recent-us-college-graduates-underemployed/.
21. “Military Benefits When Your Service is Up,” Military Benefit Association, August 2024, https://www.militarybenefit.org/get-educated/military-benefits-after-separation/.
22. Blue Star Families, 2021 Military Family Lifestyle Survey: Comprehensive Report on Employment Satisfaction (Blue Star Families, March 2022), https://bluestarfam.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/BSF_MFLS_Results2021_Employment-Satisfaction_03_10.pdf.
23. U.S. Army Public Affairs, “Army Announces Transformation of Its Recruiting Enterprise.”
24. “College Enrollment and Work Activity of Recent High School and College Graduates Summary,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23 April 2024, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm.

 

Back to Top