Army Officials Voice Concern Over Shortfall In Recruitment

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New York Times
March 4, 2005

Army Officials Voice Concern Over Shortfall In Recruitment

By Eric Schmitt

WASHINGTON, March 3 - The Army is so short of new recruits that for first time in nearly five years it failed in February to fill its monthly quota of volunteers sent to boot camp. Army officials called it the latest ominous sign of the Iraq war's impact on the military's ability to enlist fresh troops.

"We're very concerned about it," Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday when asked about recruiting shortfalls in the active-duty Army and Army Reserve. "When people ask you what you worry about the most, I say there's just two words: people and money."

In February, the active-duty Army shipped 5,114 recruits to boot camp, 27 percent below its goal of 7,050; it was the first time since May 2000 that the Army missed a monthly goal. For the first five months of the current fiscal year, the Army has met 94 percent of its goal of 29,185 new soldiers in basic training. Over all, the Army plans to bring in 80,000 new recruits this year - 3,000 more than last year - to replace soldiers who retire or do not re-enlist.

S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command, attributed the decline in February to an improving economy that siphoned off potential soldiers and the news coverage of the violence in Iraq, which so far has claimed about 1,500 American lives. The Army's February drop-off was reported on Thursday by USA Today.

Army officials insisted on Thursday that increased recruiting efforts, including hundreds of additional recruiters and re-enlistment bonuses of up to $20,000, would help the Army meet its overall annual recruiting targets.

"We're not pushing the panic button yet," Col. Joseph Curtin, an Army spokesman, said. "The Army is banking on the traditional summer surge of new recruits."

But some independent military personnel specialists warned that the traditional kinds of incentives that have cured recruiting woes in peacetime had never been tested in a prolonged war with large overseas combat deployments.

"What we don't know is if the old tools - more recruiters, bonuses and education benefits - will work in the same way as they have in the past," said Beth J. Asch, a senior economist specializing in military personnel issues at the RAND Corporation, a military-financed research organization.

The Army's problem has been developing for several months as the pool of volunteers who have agreed to enter service after a specified delay has shrunk and as the Army pushes new volunteers into service as fast as possible. Recruits signing up now typically wait about 50 days before shipping out to boot camp, compared with 110 days last year.

The Marine Corps, the main provider of ground troops in Iraq, is also facing unexpected recruiting strains. The Marine Recruiting Command said on Thursday that in February it narrowly missed its contracting goal, the number of recruits signed up but not yet shipped to basic training, for the second straight month.

But the Marine Corps actually exceeded its target for new recruits shipped to boot camp in February, and is slightly ahead of its overall goal for the year.

In another sign of the strain, five of the six military reserve components failed to meet their recruiting goals for the first four months of the current fiscal year.

Marine and Army officials expressed confidence that they would meet their overall recruiting needs for the year, but acknowledged that the contract numbers could be a sign of trouble ahead.

"Does that mean in the future we won't have as many to ship? You bet," Lt. Gen. Jan C. Huly, the Marines' deputy commandant for plans, police and operations, and a former top Marine recruiter, said in an interview. "If we don't pick up that contracting, it will."

Top Pentagon officials acknowledged that the graphic images of casualties from Iraq and the obvious danger of serving there had caused many parents to advise their children to avoid joining the military now.

"That's a factor, that we're a nation at war," Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Thursday. "If it's a young kid who's in high school and contemplating his future, what are his parents advising him?"

Mr. Di Rita added, "I mean, without question, when there's the kind of coverage that there has been about casualties - and we certainly mourn all the casualties, but they are covered, there's prominent media coverage of casualties in Iraq - parents factor those kinds of things in to what they want their children doing."

General Huly and other top Pentagon officials said that while recruiting efforts might be faltering at the moment, re-enlistment rates, especially among combat-hardened units, remained exceedingly strong.