MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
After a post-pandemic crisis, military recruiters are on a winning streak again. WUNC's Jay Price looks at what's behind the turnaround.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says it's simple.
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PETE HEGSETH: We've already seen a huge surge under President Trump of Americans who want to join.
PRICE: President Trump agrees.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's all happened since November 5.
PRICE: But neither the Pentagon nor the Army responded to requests for information to back up claims that Trump is the reason. Katherine Kuzminski studies recruiting at the bipartisan Center for New American Security.
KATHERINE KUZMINSKI: We don't know. There is no data that says, you know, did the outcome of the election spur you to join the military?
PRICE: What we do know is that the numbers are up. And despite what the president says, that increase began well before the election. Beth Asch, at the RAND Corporation, has been analyzing military manpower issues for four decades. She says, in 2022, the Army missed its recruiting goal by about 25%, or 15,000 soldiers. The following year, it, the Navy and the Air Force all fell short.
BETH ASCH: It was spreading, if you will. So people were calling this a recruiting crisis.
PRICE: But by the end of fiscal 2024, on September 30, the services all met their recruiting missions. And in the most recent numbers released in February...
ASCH: The services have all been - they're meeting or even exceeding their mission. So that's a good news story, and it's certainly a turnaround.
PRICE: Indeed, Hegseth said Army recruiting is going better than it has in more than a decade. But the foundation of this success was built well before Trump's election. Again, analyst Katherine Kuzminski.
KUZMINSKI: We have seen the services really made an effort to modernize the structures and processes to the recruiting enterprise. We saw, especially in the Army, a real professionalization of the way that we approach managing recruiters themselves.
PRICE: The military also boosted spending on advertising and marketing. And perhaps most importantly, the Army, in 2022, created the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, which tutors potential enlistees to improve their test scores and helps those who don't meet the weight standards trim down. Last year, the Army got nearly one-quarter of its recruits through that program, and Kuzminski says it's cost effective.
KUZMINSKI: It's actually much more expensive in marketing and outreach to change someone's mind about whether or not they want to serve in the military than it might be to help individuals who don't currently meet the standard come up to the standard.
PRICE: One thing that stands out about the Army's recruitment growth is that it's disproportionately driven by women. In the 2024 recruiting year, about 10,000 women enlisted, an 18% increase from the year before.
KUZMINSKI: Whereas for male recruitment, we saw only an 8% increase.
PRICE: Kuzminski says there's no way to know yet how the new administration might affect that trend. Just as there's no data to show how many recruits may have enlisted because of Trump, we also don't know how many people have been turned off by things like Hegseth's opposition to DEI and women in combat roles.
KUZMINSKI: We don't have a survey among individuals who didn't join, why they didn't join and whether or not the election outcome had something to do with that.
PRICE: Also, Asch cautions that some of the services have accepted more recruits with lower-aptitude test scores and more without high school diplomas.
ASCH: Not all the services are on track right now to be meeting those quality marks, and those quality marks matter because they're related to readiness.
PRICE: Trump, meanwhile, has entirely banned one group - transgender people - in a move that's still playing out in the courts. The military has already begun pushing some out. If the ban is upheld, it would bar several thousand existing troops from serving and others from signing up.
For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina.
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