Global Trend

The Military Recruitment Shortfall

According to most reports in the media, the military’s biggest personnel problem is a shortage of recruits. The Army fell significantly short of its recruiting targets every month from February through May. It only met its goal for June after it lowered the target.

For the fiscal year ending September 30, the Army needs to recruit 80,000 soldiers, but it has actually enlisted only 47,121 through June 27. Despite adding hundreds of recruiters, it appears likely the Army will miss its yearly recruiting goal for the first time since 1999. While this news has made headlines, this is not the real personnel crisis the military faces. The military doesn’t have a shortage of people; it has a shortage of skills.

While recruiters are looking for new soldiers in high school cafeterias and shopping malls, the personnel it urgently needs are not teenagers. Rather, the military desperately needs experienced, technically literate people in their 30s and 40s to fight the new type of war the U.S. is waging. Simply put, the American military force does not match its strategy for confronting the changing nature of world conflicts.

To understand this situation, we need to take a closer look at this new geopolitical environment. On the positive side, the U.S. is virtually invincible. It controls the skies with its Air Force and the seas with its Navy. In a conventional war, pitting large ground forces against each other, the U.S. holds a powerful advantage because of its superior weaponry.

But the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 proved that the threat doesn’t always come from a foreign army. Small teams of terrorists can inflict devastating damage to our country. The U.S. response has been to deal crippling blows to the countries that support such terrorists, first through bombing campaigns during the Clinton administration and more recently through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by President Bush.

As George Friedman points out in an insightful Stratfor analysis, the U.S. strategy is reflexive. That is, it relies on punishing nation-states that harbor terrorists, and on responding to threats to the balance of power in Eurasia.

The strategy also hinges on a crucial principle: America fights its wars on its enemies’ soil ? or in more recent cases, on its enemies’ sand. This is an advantage, because it spares American citizens from being on the front lines of a war.

However, it is also a disadvantage because those enemies decide both when and where to go to war. Then the U.S. must send its forces overseas to respond against an entrenched foe.

In the past 16 years alone, America has intervened in Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, in addition to the large-scale military operations in the Middle East.

In these situations, the time it takes for the U.S. to deploy its forces in a foreign country takes several months. To gain a foothold, Special Operations forces and CIA paramilitaries go in first, overwhelmingly outnumbered and unfamiliar with the terrain. When the conflict is too great for them to handle alone, they must hold on and wait for reinforcements.

Even when those reinforcements arrive, they are typically on the defensive against enemy forces, which often include large populations of hostile civilians.

What this all means is that U.S. military planners never know where the next war is coming from, when it will erupt, or how many of them will occur at the same time. The armed forces are always at risk of taking on more than they can handle by trying to fight too many battles in too many countries at the same time.

This brings us back to the central problem we raised at the beginning of this discussion. The U.S. military’s skills do not match its strategy. During the Cold War, America’s armed forces and weapons were built to wage a war against the Soviets in central Europe.

Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, the U.S. is left with vast fleets of warplanes, aircraft carriers, and tanks that are too slow to deploy in its current strategy. Yet, it is trying to adapt the old weaponry and troops to its new challenges. This is the equivalent of trying to win a speedboat race with a battleship.

Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledges the mismatch. The military’s current forces need too much time to respond to a threat, and by the time they arrive, they are on the defensive. Unfortunately, Rumsfeld has not reconfigured those forces to meet the new reality.

In hisStratfor analysis, Friedman reminds us that the military is designed around the outdated assumptions that wars would be few, short, and easy to manage. Now, here’s the reality. Wars have become more frequent since the end of the Cold War. They don’t end as quickly as military planners assumed they would. And, for the reasons we’ve examined, they are anything but easy to manage.

This means that troops are kept in the combat zone longer than planned. As the conflict wears on, troop rotations bring in more and more reserves to replace full-time soldiers. And because the combat zone is chosen by the enemy, they are at a tactical disadvantage from the moment they arrive.

Given this reality, we offer the following eight forecasts:

First, the U.S. will not change its fundamental military strategy. The only effective response to the greatest threats the country faces is to take the fight to the enemy on its own ground. As a result, President Bush will continue to target foreign countries that support terrorists, in order to cripple their ability to launch another attack on the U.S. Because the strategy will not change, this leads to the second forecast.

Second, the military force will be reconfigured. The reality is that, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will be involved in several wars at the same time, and American military planners cannot be certain where or when they will take place. Today’s forces, designed to be deployed slowly to fight a conventional war against one large country that no longer exists, must be reshaped so they can respond quickly and effectively against multiple threats at a moment’s notice.

Third, the Army is likely to continue to fall short of its overall recruiting goals for the foreseeable future. It seems highly unlikely that the Army will reach its target of 80,000 recruits by September 30. This is important to our discussion only because if the military continues on its current course, the shortfall will lead to desperate measures that will further weaken the skills of its troops in order to gain “head count.” For example, the most likely solution is to increase the number of recruits who fall below the testing line. The Army requires that 67 percent of its new recruits must score above 50 percent on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Test. However, 71 percent of its recruits this year have scored above 50 percent, so the Army can accept more of the candidates with lower scores, USA Today reports. This is exactly the opposite of what the military must do in order to build a smarter, more flexible force.

Fourth, and most importantly, the focus of military recruiting must change dramatically, from stockpiling “head count” to matching the most urgent needs with the right “skills count.” Contrary to most media reports, the answer isn’t to get more teenagers to enlist. The solution is to get more people with the right mix of skills to respond to today’s challenges. This includes people in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s, who have solid experience and valuable skills in such areas as systems analysis, computer programming, accounting, logistics, and so on.

Fifth, barring a major military crisis, the draft is not a serious option. Although a draft that includes civilians as old as 50 would provide the necessary skills the military needs, the American public remains opposed to a draft. Because support for the war in Iraq is falling, it would be political suicide for leaders to institute a draft. In fact, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey laughed when a reporter asked him about the draft in March 2005, claiming, “The D-word is the farthest thing from my thoughts.”

Sixth, the military will almost certainly increase its incentives to entice more recruits to join the armed forces. The Army now offers to repay recruits’ existing student loans, and offers $20,000 bonuses for recruits that can fill particularly scarce positions. It is seeking approval from Congress to double the bonus amount to $40,000, and to offer $50,000 in mortgage assistance for those who enlist for eight years of active duty. We expect these measures to pass easily. But to attract older civilians away from careers in Fortune 500 companies, the bonuses and perks will have to increase by at least two or three times those amounts.

Seventh, recruiters will turn to technology to improve their effectiveness at recruiting the most talented people. The Defense Department is already building a database of high school and college students to help identify potential recruits, according to The Washington Post. The data, including the students’ birth dates, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, and what subjects they are studying, are managed by BeNow, Inc., a private marketing firm. Similar data on older people are readily available. For example, military recruiters could find thousands of resumes on Web sites like Monster.com.

Eighth, the government will focus on offering U.S. citizenship in exchange for military service. About 3 percent of military personnel are legal U.S. residents who are not citizens. In fiscal 2004, 7,627 alien service members became U.S. citizens. That’s nearly 15 times as many as the 518 who became citizens in 2000, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, cited in USA Today.5 An executive order signed by President Bush in 2002 allows any legal resident who enlists in the military to immediately petition for citizenship rather than wait the five years required for civilians to start the process. This has led to huge increases in the number of naturalization petitions from military personnel. Because many highly skilled, foreign-born resident aliens are eager to become U.S. citizens, this is a perfect way to solve the military skills shortfall.

References List :
1. Stratfor.com, June 14, 2005, “Geopolitics, Strategy and Military Recruitment: The American Dilemma,” by George Friedman. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by Strategic Forecasting, Inc. All rights reserved.2. ibid.3. USA Today, June 29, 2005, “Army Recruiting Up for June but Still Down for Year,” by Dave Moniz. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by USA Today, a division of Gannett Co., Inc. All rights reserved.4. The Washington Post, June 23, 2005, “Pentagon Creating Student Database; Recruiting Tool for Military Raises Privacy Concerns,” by Jonathan Krim. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by The Washington Post Company. All rights reserved.5. USA Today, June 30, 2005, “Troops Put Lives on Line To Be Called Americans,” by Gregg Zoroya. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by USA Today, a division of Gannett Co., Inc. All rights reserved.