Military Recruitment Is on the Rise. Now What?

Evan Banks

You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast by RAND. I'm Evan Banks. Today we'll be discussing military recruitment with a leading expert on the topic, RAND's Beth Asch. As an economist, she's led numerous studies on military recruiting and personnel supply to the armed forces, military compensation design, and more. Welcome to the show, Beth.

Beth Asch

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Evan Banks

We saw a trend in recent years of multiple services struggling to meet their recruiting goals, correct?

Beth Asch

Yeah, so people are labeling this a recruiting crisis. And usually when recruiting becomes difficult, it shows up in the Army first. The Army's the largest service. It has the biggest goal. And so that's where it shows up. And sure enough, it started to show up in 2018. And then again, in 2022, the Army missed its recruiting mission in 2022. And then it sort of spread. So in 2023, only the Marine Corps and Space Force met their recruiting goals, and so it became much more widespread across the services.

Evan Banks

Okay, so 2018 and 2022, what factors might've been driving this downturn?

Beth Asch

So the truth is, is that a lot of people blamed a lot of things, our policymakers, and pundits, and whatnot. Two of the big reasons people give is a low interest in joining the military among the youth population and a low percent of young people who would qualify for military service. And indeed, they are low, and those two things are both very concerning. The thing is, is they've been low for decades, and so it can't explain why suddenly recruiting became more difficult. But it's also the case that we actually don't know why there has been problems. There are a lot of hypotheses, but the kind of rigorous analyses, kind of like the forensics of what happened with recruiting, what changed, taking into account all the different factors, that analysis is yet to be done. And so all we can do is look at past research about what factors we know in the past have affected recruiting, and then just have hypotheses about, well, other things that are new, like the pandemic, that might've affected it, but frankly, we just don't have the analysis to say, well, X percent of the problems was due to this. We don't know.

Evan Banks

But we do have numbers from this past year, and those numbers are starting to rebound, correct?

Beth Asch

Yeah, so recruiting actually turned around, started to turn around for the end of the fiscal year 2024, which for the federal government ends September 30th. So for the end of September 2024, fiscal year 2024 all the services, but the Navy met their recruiting goals, and even in the case of the Navy, they were well on track. Even they were in really good shape more or less in terms of overall numbers. And then since then, in fiscal year 2025, which started in October, we've now had a few months, all the services are either making their recruiting goal or well exceeding it, such as in the case of the Army and the Navy.

Evan Banks

How would we even go about sort of isolating all of the different things that go into whether or not the services meet these recruiting goals? There's so many different factors involved, right? Like, what are the kinds of different things that can affect—you, you mentioned the pandemic might be one.

Beth Asch

Yeah, so even before the beginning of the all-volunteer force, which started in 1973, there have been studies of, you know, these are statistical rigorous analyzes of enlistment data and state-of-the-art statistical methods to analyze the—regression analysis and so forth—the effects of different variables, like the effect of the civilian economy, you know, when the economy gets worse or gets better. Civilian earnings get better, when military pay gets better, when there are more recruiters on the ground, when the services do more marketing and advertising, when they're offering bonuses, when they are increasing the use of waivers. And we have data on each of these factors at the very disaggregated level nationally, and we track that over time and can do analyzes to try to isolate what are the effects of individual variables. It can get very complex because, like in the last few years, a lot of things happened at once, and then it starts getting much more difficult to attribute to one thing versus another.

Evan Banks

This is sort of the big question at the end of it all, but, so from your career researching military recruitment, what have we learned about how military services can reach their goals or improve recruiting?

Beth Asch

So in terms of this crisis, there's what we might call more short-term strategies, which the services pursued, and longer-term strategies. So what we've learned is, ultimately, what the services are trying to do is meet their overall strength. They have to have so many people in the military. And you can either get there by recruiting them or having more people stay. You want both. When there's a recruiting shortfall, one way to make sure you have enough people on hand is just get more people to stay longer. So one of the strategies has been increased retention. And indeed, retention has been extremely strong. And we could talk about why, but it has been strong. But encouraging more retention is definitely a good strategy to deal with recruiting problems. Other things are increasing bonuses. Bonuses are very expensive, but they're something you can deploy very quickly. And the services, indeed, have increased their usage of bonuses. Marketing and advertising take longer to develop those campaigns and the messaging and targeting and so forth, and the type of media you want to target, digital and whatnot. But those, research shows, is very cost effective. Recruiters, not just the numbers of recruiters, but the selection of recruitors, the training of recruiters: Where are they deployed across the country? How are they motivated? They're essentially salespeople. So there's all kinds of ways to motivate salespeople; how do you manage them? And so a lot of research showing that recruiters matter, and especially recruiter management, how they're managed matters as well. And then things related to eligibility, waivers is a policy that services have used extensively and which can be very effective in increasing supply. So those are some of the policies that have been studied in the past.

Evan Banks

So between 2018, when almost all of the services weren't meeting their goals, and 2024, when almost of them are starting to meet their goals, is there evidence to suggest that they implemented any of these changes that you just referenced? And if not, then do we know what changed?

Beth Asch

So the answer is all of the above. They did it all. In fact, they did, and then some. So they implemented a lot of new policies, things that hadn't been done before. So for example, the Army created something called the Future Soldier Preparation Course, which took individuals who maybe were just marginally not quite qualified in terms of meeting the medical standard and particularly the weight standard or the aptitude, because maybe they don't test well or whatever. And putting them through a sort of boot camp and then testing them again so that they qualify. So that's a whole new program. It turned out that the Army found that that program was very successful in getting people to the point where they could qualify. So they expanded that program extensively. Then the Navy started with a Future Sailor prep course. Just many things. Almost arguably, they took a, you know, throw the spaghetti against the wall and saw what stuck, you know? They just did an incredible number of new efforts looking at eligibility criteria, how they're doing waivers, how they are selecting recruiters. The Army has moved towards targeting not just high school seniors but getting older recruits people who are now a couple of years out of high school who may have decided that maybe the labor market or college wasn't for them and the military looks better now. So they have implemented many of the things that research shows as effective; I mentioned bonuses, marketing, recruiters. And then there's the then some is that Congress implemented a massive pay raise for junior enlisted members. Today is April 1st, as it turns out, and today is the day that that pay raise goes into effect. It's a 10% pay raise for people who are in the junior grades, enlisted grades.

Evan Banks

So these, we're talking about numbers and now the services are becoming more successful in reaching their goals, but the numbers don't tell the whole story. We can also talk about the quality of these recruits. How is quality defined in terms of military recruitment and service?

Beth Asch

Yeah, sometimes people think that's a weird term, like what's the quality of a person, but it has a very specific definition. So the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which is the civilian part of the military which oversees the uniform part of military, sets two benchmarks for recruiting each year. Every service is required to bring in at least 90% high school diploma graduates among the people they enlist and 60% have to score above average on an aptitude test that enlisted recruits have to take. And the reason for those particular quality marks is that a lot of research, frankly, a lot of research conducted at RAND has shown that individuals who finish high school, they get the diploma, are also individuals who tend to complete their service obligation. They're less likely to leave early. So the high school diploma is really trying to get people who are not going to drop out. And then the aptitude, a lot of research showed that individuals with higher aptitude scores they perform better on real military tasks in their units and in all kinds of types of units, whether it's maintenance, communication, weapon systems, they understand the directions, they follow the directions better, and they're more efficient in implementing those instructions. They just do better. And so again, that's sort of the logic behind those quality marks. So your original question is, what about quality? So these are the benchmarks. And last year in 2024, the Navy failed to make the benchmark, especially with respect to aptitude. And so far in 2025, it looks like the Army and the Navy are not making those quality benchmarks. But to be fair, the benchmark is measured at the end of the year. But if they're not making it over the first few months, and here we've through about half the fiscal year, it puts a lot of pressure on getting to the finish line at the end of the year if you haven't done the job in the first half of the year.

Evan Banks

You said in a recent interview, I think, that the quality of recruits is a true military readiness issue. What did you mean by that?

Beth Asch

It's a readiness issue because it's a performance issue. Attrition, I mentioned high school diploma graduates are less likely to drop out. And that's a readiness issue. We train people. It's an investment. And if they drop out, they have to be replaced. And that a readiness issue. But the thing about attrition is that's manageable. You can manage with maybe a unit not quite to 100% manning. But if people don't have the cognitive ability to understand their training, absorb the training, implement the training work effectively in teams, communicate effectively, you know, to do all the things we ask military personnel to do in their jobs, the jobs are not gonna get done in the same way. And so that's where the readiness, so the fact that quality seems to be lagging as a potential area for concern for where readiness is going. And it's a particular concern for the Navy who missed, they didn't just miss it by a little, they missed it by lot in 2024. And that, you know, we usually think of the Navy as a, you know a very high tech service where people are using technology and state of the art. We have to have people who know how to work, you know, do those systems and understand it.

Evan Banks

I admit as a layperson, as a non-researcher, as non-veteran, non-military associated person, this idea of recruitment quality is really interesting to me. It's not just about getting enough people in the door, but the types of people that they are and that has an impact on what the rest of their service looks like and what they're able to do when they're in the service. It's really interesting work. What can help the services improve this level of quality when it comes to recruits? Again, not just the number of recruits getting in the door, but the actual quality of the recruits themselves.

Beth Asch

It turns out that much of the research I had mentioned before, the effects of recruiters, pay, bonuses, advertising, marketing, you know, all those things, all of those studies were focused on high-quality recruits. And so all of these studies provide evidence that those policies are quite effective. And so we have policies. But really what it comes down to, one of the key things, is the services have to be targeting their recruiters towards those individuals. So what that means is when, so each of the recruiting commands, they have a sales workforce. That's what the recruiters are. And the sales workforce are given a mission. So you're told you need to bring in one recruit per month. The mission doesn't always say bring in one high quality recruit per month. So they really need to be focusing their recruiters on those markets. So one thing has to do with how the services are targeting their efforts towards the right market. But then the other side of that, I think, has to do with helping young people who are higher quality, who have good civilian, these individuals have good civilian opportunities. They are likely to get into colleges, into good colleges. They can get better civilian jobs, right? And so they have to see the military as competitive. And surveys suggest that young people see the military as something that is going to be, it's like it's going to interfere with their career plans. It's something that takes them off the path as opposed to something that is a stepping stone on their path. And in fact, we know the military is a stepping stone. It gives people training, experience, and so forth, as well as qualification for education benefits to help them pay for college, right? So I think part of it is also targeting the effort, but also improving the awareness among the target market that the military is an attractive option and not necessarily an interruption in their careers, but actually a way of facilitating the career they see themselves having.

Evan Banks

I'm trying to think kind of how we can put a bow on this and say, like, well, this is what the military is going to do going forward, and we're going to have a happy ending at the end of this, and they'll reach recruitment goals, and more recruits will be of higher quality than ever before. But we don't really, the data hasn't come in yet, right, so.

Beth Asch

No, that's right. I do think that, you know, obviously the fact that they're all making their overall goal is a good news story. We don't know exactly why, but we know tremendous effort on the part of the services, the Office of Secretary of Defense, Congress, leadership. It has been a number one issue and the success is really a tribute to a lot of those efforts, even though we don't which specific efforts it was. And I think now that they're making the overall mission, it's time to focus on other important things such as the quality and also start being more focused. Like there were so many programs implemented and so many, let's try this, let try that, let's go here, let do the, and it's I think time to say, okay, time to let's think about what has worked or we think has worked and focus there. Instead of the just try everything. And I guess the last thing I would say is it's also now that there's been some success, it's time to look at maybe some of the more longer-term issues that will need some thought. So for example, we know that there has been some shifting in the labor market for young people. There's been a lot of talk of what's going on with young men. Well, most people who join the military are young men, and we can talk about why that's the case, but that is the case. And so to the extent that we're seeing a lot of changes in for young men, you know, we talk about behavioral health issues, ADHD, mental health, labor market, you know, all of that, it's time to get a better understanding of what does that all mean for recruiting.

Evan Banks

So speaking of recruiting, in the 70s, I think, the United States ended the draft and moved to a all-volunteer force. So how did that change affect the military's recruiting goals?

Beth Asch

The all-volunteer force came in in 1973, and what happened in the early years, it was like a grand experiment. Who could man a huge force with all volunteers? I mean, it was almost like unheard of. I mean you think about today, China, Russia, they're all draft forces, and here we were trying to do this volunteer thing, right, and we started in 1973. And in the earlier years, there was some, I'll call them scary moments. So one of the scary moments was that the quality of people who were coming in was extremely low. And there were a number of reasons that have to do that. One of them had to do with they made a mistake in the scoring of that aptitude test. They thought they essentially gave the wrong scores. So a lot of people we thought were higher quality actually turned out to be lower quality. But there were whole bunch of reasons. But the quality was really low. And the Army said we cannot do our mission. This was in the early 80s. We cannot do our mission with this force. It's just not working. And so that resulted in, I'm going to approximate because I don't know exactly, but essentially over close to a 25% pay increase for the military between 1981 and 1982. It was a massive, this was the Reagan buildup. It was a massive pay raise. You know, the idea was is we have to get on a new path. And then there were a whole introduction of bringing in bonus programs that were targeted to those high-quality kids. They brought in something called the Army College Fund, which again was targeted to individuals who enlist in difficult-to-fill occupations, but importantly, the kids were higher quality or the enlistees. So I would say the early 80s was, you know, we got a problem here, we've got to fix it. And they did fix it, so by the end of the 80s, the quality of the force was extremely high. And it turned out that was quite fortuitous because then we went to Operation Desert Storm in the early 90s with a very high-quality force.

Evan Banks

I wonder, have there been studies comparing the quality of an all-volunteer force and the quality like a compulsory service force?

Beth Asch

There has, but as you can imagine, the data quality in the early years are just not what they are today. So there have been those kinds of studies, for sure. I think the general conclusion is the quality of a, you know, why pay? If you have a draft force, why pay for it?

Evan Banks

Right. You're not, you don't need to incentivize people to join. So yeah.

Beth Asch

So what happens with draft forces is pay tends to get really low, and then who volunteers when pay is low?

Evan Banks

So you mentioned that one way that the military can ensure that they have enough people to meet their mission goals is by pulling more people into the military. The flip side of that coin is keeping the people that they already have in the military, and that's retention. You had mentioned earlier in the episode a pay raise for junior enlisted, and you also have some recent research on military compensation. What did you learn about retention and about compensation?

Beth Asch

So, just to start off, retention has been very strong overall, across all the services. And that doesn't mean there aren't pockets of problems, in fact, there's always pockets of problems. Certain, you know, aviators, there are just always some areas where they have to pay attention. But overall, retention has been doing really well. And actually, if you look at the 50 years plus of the all-volunteer force, I mean, the success of the volunteer force in recruiting, retaining people, readiness has really been fantastic. So I just kind of want to preface when you start saying what's wrong, you get the impression that the system's falling apart, but it's on a basis of a very successful system overall. And right now, there's a lot of success in the area of retention. With respect to the compensation system, military compensation is one of the biggest budget items in the defense budget, and we know the defense budget is huge. And so efficiencies in compensation can really provide, you know, improve productivity for the same cost or you can get the same thing for less cost. And given how tight money is, it could really make a difference in putting that money to something else. And so it sort of behooves us to think about, how can we make compensation more effective, more efficient? And that was the focus of the study. Now, again, as background, every four years, the White House directs the Department of Defense to do a thorough review of the military compensation system. In fact, the 14th one of those, they came out with the report in January. And indeed, at RAND, as researchers, we contributed to that. But this effort was something independent that we did for the Army, in some ways as a precursor to that commission report. So what were some of the findings? How to make the system more effective? Well, you know, I just mentioned, I'd mentioned earlier there had been a big increase, Congress increased junior enlisted pay by a very hefty amount, an unusually high amount. But what we argue or I argue in this paper is that arguably military pay is too high. Average military pay exceeds the pay of similar civilians, and not by a little, but for enlisted by a lot. But it's also true for officers as well. And given that retention has been so strong, it begs the question, are we paying too much? I want to say, you know, I'm not trying to say that people are overpaid and people don't deserve the pay they get. I'm just saying, look, you know, we need to use our resources efficiently. And if we're going to think about efficiency, it's not clear that we need to be paying so much. Now, you could argue, what about recruiting? Recruiting hasn't been going so well. Well, it turns out pay is one of the least cost-effective ways to deal with recruiting problems. It's a really expensive approach, and there are far more cost-effective ways to deal in with recruiting problems. Advertising and marketing is extremely cost-effective, especially relative to a pay raise. Recruiters are very cost-effective, even bonuses are more cost-effective because bonuses can at least be turned off, with pay raise, the pay raise is forever more and it affects other aspects of the compensation system. So pay is not a good way to deal with recruiting problems and given that, pay might be too high. It's worth taking a look at. The way that the Department of Defense decides the annual pay raise could be improved, there are ways to improve it so that it better reflects the civilian opportunities of the people who are making recruiting and retention decisions. Currently, it doesn't do that very well. There's definitely room for improvement in the setting of the housing allowance, the food allowance. In fact, this recent commission report that came out in January sort of took a close look at the allowances. The structure of the pay table arguably could embed stronger incentives for performance, especially for officers, so we can get more performance out of the force or at least give them more incentives to perform, especially for those senior officers. There was recent retirement reform that began in 2018. It changed the retirement system that had been in place since the end of World War 2, that was a massive change. There's a question, has it lived up to its promise and have the services implemented it in a way that, you know, achieves the promise of that new retirement system as a force management tool. These special incentive pays which are targeted to people in critical occupations or who are in particular hazardous duties or in, you more, you know, less desirable locations, are those being set appropriately? Arguably, they could be done better. The system has been remarkably successful, but there's certainly room for improvement in terms of getting more productivity out of the force or the same productivity at less cost. And because it's such an expensive system, even small savings can translate into billions of dollars over time.

Evan Banks

And just logically, if you have a bucket of money and it's a limited amount of money, and you're paying people, you could theoretically do something like hire more people to accomplish a mission instead of spreading them thinner and paying those people more.

Beth Asch

Or frankly, there's a lot of concern about the Navy, and maybe we could buy more ships or build more ships. The money could go there. Not to say we should take it away from personnel, but there's no lack of places where money might be used in the military.

Evan Banks

So when we talk about compensation in the military, we're not just referring to pay, we're referring to an entire compensation package. What goes into that?

Beth Asch

That's an excellent question, because the military pay system does not look like the civilian pay system. So the foundational element is something called cash compensation. What you get in your monthly paycheck is something called basic pay, and it's based on a table. But that actually is only about 60% of your cash compensation, and sometimes even less than that. In addition, individuals get allowances. They get a housing allowance and a food allowance, and sometimes they get a cost of living allowance. And those allowances are tax-free. So that's, in a sense, another source of cash. And so, you know, when people just look at basic pay, they are not looking at really a full picture. Now, on top of that, people can get bonuses. People who do certain, like, you know, if you jump out of an airplane, you can get, you, know, jump pay. If, you're, you do diving, you can dive pay. If you are on a flight deck of an aircraft carrier, you can get flight deck pay. So there's all these extra pay, or if you're assigned to the Arctic, you can't get cold weather pay, you know, like, so there's a lot of these sort of extra pays that recognize unusual conditions, or arduous duty, or hazardous duty, and the like. So when we talk about pay and how it compares to the civilian, what we try to do is construct a subset of these pays that look the most like a civilian. And there's been a whole bunch of studies like, what would be that? What does that look like? I won't go into the details, but what we do is try to construct a measure of pay so that we can compare it to civilian pay in a way that makes sense.

Evan Banks

What do you think the most important thing U.S. military services can do right now to meet their goals and ensure both retention and readiness?

Beth Asch

I think right now the most important thing on the personnel side has to be ensuring the quality of the force, especially through recruiting. One thing we've learned, I mean, you know, we've studied 50 years of the all-volunteer force. We've studied a lot of data. And one thing we see in the data is that the quality you bring in tends to be the quality that gets retained. In other words, if you bring in a low-quality cohort, like a group that's sort of is not quite up to where it needs to be, that it's like you have this cohort that stays for the next 30 years that you have to deal with. And so it's a, you know, I'll say it cynically, it's a gift that keeps on giving if you don't bring in very good quality. So if they're not bringing in higher quality people, that could be a problem that will, you know they'll have to live with for quite some time and it's a bad problem. They don't need this. So, I think it's a problem they can deal with now. That could have important ramifications for readiness, not just over the next year or two, but over quite a long time.

Evan Banks

Beth, you're a senior principal economist at RAND, and before we started recording you had mentioned to me that you've been at RAND for 39 years now. If someone maybe recently got their Ph.D within a couple of years and they're considering working at RAND I guess I just wanted to ask like, what's your experience been like in total? Would you recommend it? It's a unique kind of place and I just want to get your take on 39 years here.

Beth Asch

Yeah, thanks for asking. I definitely would recommend it. I am amazed that even after 39 years, of working on these topics, I'm still really engaged. I find them interesting, intellectually challenging, important. There's an opportunity to have an impact in policy and yet at the same time bring to bear the kind of state-of-the-art methodologies and insights and theory that we, you know it's why we went to graduate school, why we got those degrees. So it brings together both the ability for impact as well as the ability to do the type of analysis that you would get in academia. And as I say, I'm always amazed how I'm still interested even after all these years.

Evan Banks

I think that's all the time we have today, Beth, thanks for being here.

Beth Asch

Thanks for the good questions.

Evan Banks

You can find more information about the research we discussed today in our show notes at rand.org/policyminded. Thanks again to our guest today, Beth Asch. This episode was produced by Deanna Lee. It was recorded by Emily Ashenfelter and me, Evan Banks. I also edited today's episode. RAND's Director of Digital Outreach is Pete Wilmoth. We'll see you next time on Policy Minded. RAND is a non-profit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.