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from https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2025/0811/military-recruiting-trump-defense

After years of sluggish enlistments, the US military gets a surge of
recruits

By Anna Mulrine Grobe Staff writer
@annamulrine
Aug. 11, 2025, 5:30 a.m. ET
|
Washington


With the U.S. military having recently faced what the Pentagon warned
was its most serious personnel shortage in half a century, recruitment
is now solidly on the rise.

President Donald Trump – who has regularly called on the military for
both domestic and foreign matters since returning to office – attributes
the turnaround to a surge in patriotism inspired by his election and new defense leaders who are rooting out what they decry as “wokeness” in the ranks.

Defense analysts, meanwhile, offer a different explanation. They cite
measures taken years ago that are now bearing fruit, including pay
raises, accelerated pathways to citizenship, and programs to coach
recruits with lagging academic or fitness scores.

Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has focused on building military strength.
Attracting new soldiers has required extra effort.

Trump administration officials say that, in any case, the recent gains
must be studied and understood to be maintained. To this end, the
Department of Defense in June launched a Military Service Recruitment
Task Force. Its recommendations are due in mid-August.

“The [recruitment] numbers are great now,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said at a June press briefing. “But six months from now, we’ll see.”

Why did recruiting drop off in the first place?
The U.S. military’s challenges began making headlines after the Army
missed its recruitment goal by about 25% in fiscal year 2022. With a
goal of 60,000 new soldiers, it had signed up just 45,000.

One factor, analysts said, was the isolation rules of the COVID-19
pandemic, during which U.S. military services temporarily halted basic
training efforts. Many high schools were also closed during this time to
both students and military recruiters.

“We had to pull out of communities for almost two years,” said Katie Helland, the Pentagon’s top recruiting official, in a discussion with reporters last October. “It takes time to get back in and develop those relationships again.”

Following the pandemic lockdown, aspiring recruits’ scores on military entrance tests dropped, and rates of obesity and mental health diagnoses increased.

Today, defense officials report that more than three-quarters of young
people between the ages of 17 and 24 cannot qualify for military service without a waiver, an exception that allows individuals to serve despite disqualifying factors.

The inclination for young people to join the armed services also
decreased. In a Department of Defense survey published in March of this
year, some 87% of those between the ages of 16 and 21 said they were
probably – or definitely – not planning to serve in the military. Two
out of 3 said that they were concerned about the emotional or
psychological impact of war, and almost 3 out of 4 cited concerns about
the possibility of physical injury or death.

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For the first time since the Pentagon began tracking the metric, the
majority of youth, as one official put it, “never even considered
military service as an option.”


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At the same time, historically low unemployment rates for young people
created stiff competition from the private sector for talent.

When and why did recruitment start to rebound?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has credited President Trump’s election
with what he and other administration officials have called the “Trump bump” for military recruitment.

“They see leadership ... that says, ‘We want you to be warriors. We’re not doing this politically correct garbage anymore. We’re doing war fighting,” Secretary Hegseth said on a visit to Normandy, France, in
June to honor the 81st anniversary of D-Day.

In fact, Pentagon figures show that military enlistments began bouncing
back between October 2023 and September 2024 – before Mr. Trump was
elected – rising by about 12.5%.

Starting in 2023, Congress passed three straight basic pay raises for
troops, amounting to between 4.5% and 5.2% annually. Another 10% pay
increase for junior enlistees – those in the lowest service ranks – went into effect this past April, adding an additional $3,000 to $6,000 per
year to the pockets of each of those new soldiers.

These hikes marked the largest increases in troops’ basic pay in two
decades. The annual base salaries for new troops have increased from
about $22,000 in 2022 to nearly $28,000 in 2025.


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Since 2017, the services have also spent more on recruiting and
retention bonuses, particularly for tougher-to-fill jobs, such as in
cyber specialties.

In part to help address the impact of isolation during the pandemic, the
Army also created preparatory courses starting in 2022 to ready recruits
for basic training. The Navy later did the same. Graduates of these
courses now account for about one-quarter of all Army enlistments.

“The services and Congress really put a tremendous amount of attention
in terms of various policies and reforms, and we saw an improvement,”
says Beth Asch, a senior principal economist who specializes in military staffing at the Rand think tank.

By October 2024, enlistments were up 60% over the previous year. In
March of this year, the services welcomed 13,000 new recruits – nearly
50% more than at the same time last year, but still fewer than the
16,800 recorded in January 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, and the 20,000 recorded in August 2024 under President Joe Biden.

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already on their way at the end of fiscal year 2024,” which ended Sept. 30.

Will the positive trajectory continue?
Due in part to its success and lowered recruiting goals last year, the
Army now has a surplus of some 11,000 applicants awaiting basic
training, nearly double the number from the previous year. The Air
Force’s surplus is the highest it’s been in a decade.


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In response, the Army is creating 10 more basic training units to train
an additional 10,000 new soldiers each year.

The surplus recruits from 2024 will count toward this year’s Army goal
of bringing in 60,000 new soldiers. This past June, the Army announced
that it had reached its target months ahead of schedule.

After lowering its goals – as the Army did – during the recruiting
slump, the Air Force reversed course and increased its recruiting goals
by 20% for 2025. Though it later dialed that goal back to an 11%
increase, the Air Force met that goal three months ahead of schedule.
The Space Force increased its recruiting goals as well.

Though it didn’t increase its recruiting goals, the Navy has already met
its targets for the year, too. So has the Marine Corps.

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How are the services reaching out to young people?
Air Force officials have noted the success of a 2023 program that offers foreign-born recruits an accelerated path to citizenship. Recruits can
complete paperwork and take citizenship tests immediately upon entering
basic training. By the time they graduate 7 1/2 weeks later, they can be
sworn in as citizens.


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Marine Corps recruiters similarly tout an immigration benefit that
grants temporary legal status and protection from deportation to
unauthorized immigrants who are family members of U.S. citizens serving
in the military. However, amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the Marine Corps reportedly told its recruiters to stop
promoting this program, known as parole in place, earlier this summer.

Navy leaders have also created new career specialties, such as robotics,
which they say are appealing to young people. The service has also been
trying to improve sailors’ quality of life through initiatives that
include everything from 24/7 access to gyms to better parking.

“There has been an explosion in retention, which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. It’s been historically high in all the services,” in large
part because of the generous military benefits, Dr. Asch says. These
include housing allowances, college tuition for family members, and
medical care.

At the same time, the Pentagon is launching social media campaigns to
target “parents, educators, and other relevant adult influencers to
build advocacy for military service.” It is also developing experimental “prospecting” tools that use artificial intelligence “to enhance recruiter efficiency.”

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The Defense Department’s new Recruitment Task Force is bringing together
data analysts, lawyers, and recruiters working in the field. Their
mission: to provide insights “that will outlast this president,” Mr. Parnell said, “and be a tool subsequent presidents and secretaries can use.”

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The task force plans to tackle, among other things, the backlog of
medical waivers that military doctors can grant for conditions like
childhood asthma and gestational diabetes, a diagnosis given to some 10%
of pregnant women in the United States.

The waivers currently take an average of six months to process across
the services, said Mr. Parnell, who is co-chairing the task force. “And
by that time [recruits] have got another job.”

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