04-07-2007

Defense - Recruiting in Wartime

James Kitfield (Email this author)
© National Journal Group, Inc.


HOUSTON -- As far as Capt. Antonio Hernandez is concerned, the most important front for a wartime Army can be seen from this small recruiting station tucked in a strip mall in Friendswood, Texas. On this morning Hernandez, a company commander in the Army's Houston recruiting battalion, is checking in on one of his teams and talking to a chunky young man with the patchy whiskers of someone not yet accustomed to shaving regularly. Sitting beside the potential recruit is his teenage girlfriend, feet tucked up on the chair and knees to her chin.


"So how'd you do on the aptitude test?" Hernandez asks.


The young man responds that he got a relatively high score on the military's standard aptitude test, but he is worried that his height-to-weight ratio and body-fat level are outside Army standards.


"Don't worry, you don't look too bad," Hernandez assures him. "You'll be huffing and puffing at first, but by the time you get through basic, you'll run a couple of miles without breaking a sweat."


"I hope so," the young man says, seeming to recall the language of a recruiting brochure as he adds, "I definitely want to maximize my physical potential."


Recruiting is a delicate dance and one with little modern precedent: an army of uniformed recruiters, scouring the countryside looking for young men and women to fight an all-volunteer war. Part pitchmen and part guidance counselors, recruiters ply their trade at NASCAR events and rodeos, at auto shows and drag races, at high school football games and spring-break parties, and even on college campuses. You can find them wherever America's youth gather, practicing what Hernandez calls the "science of sales balanced with the art of influencing someone to make a life-changing decision." Be part of something bigger than yourself. Use the modern-day GI Bill to go to college. Secure a good job when you get out. Defend your country against all enemies. Maximize your potential.


Here in the heartland, that message resonates powerfully. The Houston recruiting battalion -- whose 180 recruiters have to work a territory that spans 39,000 square miles and includes 360 high schools, 59 colleges, and 47 recruiting stations -- nearly always makes its goal. In recent years the battalion has put an average of 3,200 fresh recruits "into boots" annually. When recruiters eat in crowded restaurants, they often find that someone has paid for their meals by the time they finish. People walk up to shake their hands and to thank them for their service. Strangers applaud them in airports.


"Texas is plain patriotic, and its support for the military is beyond anything that I've seen," said Lt. Col. Troy Reeves, commander of the Houston recruiting battalion.


Yet persuading young Americans raised on McDonald's supersized meals and Xbox video games to join a wartime Army is anything but easy. When its founders crafted the all-volunteer military in the 1970s, they never anticipated that it would be sent off to fight a war lasting years. At that time, even deploying the force required a major call-up of reserves, and the all-volunteer force was viewed as merely the vanguard of a mass-mobilization army augmented by the draft. Today, the all-volunteer Army is in its fifth year of combat with no end to fighting in sight.


"We make sure enlistees understand that there is a good possibility that they will deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and when I'm asked about that my reply is that we didn't start this war," Hernandez said. "Al Qaeda attacked us on U.S. soil, and we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here. I also point out that freedom isn't free. The bottom line is that if my recruiters don't put people into uniform, the Army is not going to be able to put platoons in the field to do the fighting. So we all believe in what we're doing here."


The science of recruiting comes down to a numbers game, and the numbers reveal the challenge that the Army faces as it tries to expand and sustain a wartime force. Of the primary target audience of 17-to-24-year-olds, only about three in 10 are high school graduates who can also meet the service's mental, physical, and moral standards. Yet the Army remains a voracious consumer of manpower, needing 80,000 recruits in 2007 just to maintain its current size. That figure is more than twice the number of new men and women that any of the other armed services need. And this number is slated to increase to 84,000 in fiscal 2008, as the Army attempts over several years to expand its total size by 65,000 soldiers. Meanwhile, the "propensity" of American youth to join the military, as measured by annual surveys given to high school students, is down somewhat in recent years, and more than 65 percent of graduating seniors now opt to attend college rather than to join the military.


"The trends in terms of the obesity and misdemeanor convictions are also not in our favor, because kids are getting heavier, and they are more likely to get arrested in this post-Columbine era for things they would have just been sent home from school for in the past," said Col. Don Bartholomew, referring to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. "So the nature of demographics dictated that we were going to have a very tough time if we didn't adjust our standards," Bartholomew, the head of marketing and strategic communications at Army Accessions Command at Fort Monroe, Va., continued. "We had to expand the pool of potential recruits." 


The Army's controversial answer was to grant "waivers" of its standards to 15 percent of its recruits in fiscal 2006. About half of those (7.7 percent) were given "moral waivers" because of criminal records (7,202 for misdemeanors and more than 1,000 for more-serious crimes, most of them felonies), according to the Army Recruiting Command. An additional 6.3 percent were given "medical waivers." The remaining 1 percent (1,063 recruits) were given "drug and alcohol" waivers. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank in Washington, high school graduates made up 82 percent of the 2006 enlistment class (not including those with an "equivalent," or GED, degree); that's below the Army's benchmark of 90 percent and the lowest rate since 1981. The number of recruits scoring above the 50th percentile on the military aptitude test was 61 percent, the lowest proportion since 1985, according to the CSBA. The Army also raised its age limit for recruits to 42 and altered the basic training regime with an eye toward failing fewer trainees. As a result, the basic training graduation rate rose from 82 percent in 2005 to 94 percent in 2006. 


"The numbers indicate that moral waivers in the Army have quadrupled over the last decade," said CSBA Executive Director Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "They are allowing significantly more high school dropouts and felons into uniform; they appear to be lowering standards in basic training; and if it wasn't for recruits over the age of 35, the Army would have come close to missing its recruiting goal last year. That adds up to a pretty dicey picture."


For Army recruiters, the numbers game breaks down like this: Even a talented recruiter with natural sales skills will need to make initial contact with a minimum of 40 potential recruits each month. Through follow-up phone calls and e-mails, they must somehow persuade 24 of those prospects to make an appointment to hear the Army's telephone pitch about enlistment bonuses, which average $20,000 but can reach $40,000 in some cases, and Army College Fund guarantees, which average $37,000 but can climb higher depending on the military specialty chosen. Of that group, 16 must be sufficiently interested to come to a recruiting station for the full pitch; at least four of those eventually need to take the aptitude and physical tests to confirm that they are qualified to join. Because at the end of each month of typically 65-to-75-hour workweeks, each and every one of the service's 8,425 recruiters must put two enlistees into boots for the numbers to add up for the Army. Or, as a recruiter will tell you, "It's all about the contracts."


The majority of recruiters today are combat veterans who will return to operational units and lead the same recruits they sign up. And at some point during all of their face time with the youth of America and their families, coaches, and high school guidance counselors, those recruiters seem to stop worrying about the quality of the nation's new warrior class. For every waiver statistic, they have a personal anecdote about the 39-year-old mother of six who lost 40 pounds so she could join the Army, or the surgeon who enlisted just to do his part as a medic, or the "felon" whose crime was playing with matches as a youngster and accidentally burning down his neighbor's toolshed.


The statistic that matters most, these recruiters will tell you, is the one that tends to be overlooked. "This generation we're recruiting right now, you've got to realize that these kids are joining the Army of a nation at war," said Sgt. 1st Class Charles Colbert, commander of a small recruiting station in Friendswood, Texas. "Damn, how can your hat not be off to someone like that?"





 

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