After a post-pandemic crisis, military recruiters are on a winning streak again. All the services beat their enlistment goals for the 2024 recruiting year which ended Sept. 30, and they've posted strong numbers so far for this year.
What’s behind the turnaround? The Secretary of Defense says it’s simple.
"We’ve already seen a huge surge under President Trump of Americans who want to join," said Pete Hegseth in a video posted on X.
And President Trump agrees.
"It’s all happened since Nov. 5," he said at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
They say the recruiting successes are being driven by enthusiasm for the president and by Hegseth's focus on tougher standards and on purging the military of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But it’s hard to know how much truth there is to those claims, said Katherine Kuzminski, who studies military personnel and civil military relations at the Center for New American Security.
"We don't know," she said. "There is no data that says, you know, did the outcome of the election spur you to join the military?"
Neither the Pentagon nor the Army responded to requests for data to back up the claims that President Trump is behind the jump.
What we do know is that the numbers are up, but — 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 notes that in 2022, the Army missed its recruiting goal by about 25%, or 15,000 soldiers. The following year, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force all fell short. It was the first time in Air Force history it didn’t make its targets.
"People were calling this a recruiting crisis," Asch said.
The roots of the recruiting drop were varied and complicated. Longer term trends include an increase in college attendance, which competes for people in the military's prime recruiting age, and a growing divide between the civilian and military world as fewer families include somebody who served.
In addition, a rise in obesity, health, and mental health issues left fewer than a quarter of enlistment-age Americans eligible for military service without some form of waiver. Also, the pandemic led many young people to put off career decisions and prevented recruiters from working in-person with potential enlistees.
"What we can see in the data is that American youth at the age of 18 or so were delaying a lot of adult decision making," Kuzminski said.
But by the end of fiscal 2024 on Sept. 30, all the services said they met their recruiting missions. And in the most recent data, released in February, they reported strong results. Hegseth said December was the Army's best recruiting month in 12 years and January the best in 15 years.
These successes came after aggressive moves by the military that began well before Trump's election.
"The services really made an effort to modernize structures and processes to the recruiting enterprise," Kuzminski said. "We saw, especially in the Army, a real professionalization of the way that we approach managing recruiters themselves."
For instance, the Army created a new career specialty in recruiting that requires substantial training.
"The chief of recruiting in the Army was elevated from a two-star position to a three-star position that now reports directly to the Secretary of the Army," she said. “And we also see more engagement with potential recruits online, and not only relying on the storefront model that has been the more historic model of recruiting and instead meeting individual American youth more where they're at."
The military also boosted spending on advertising and marketing. And in perhaps the biggest change, in 2022 the Army created the Future Soldier Preparatory Course.
It tutors potential enlistees who need to increase their scores on aptitude tests and helps those who don’t quite meet the weight standards trim down.
Last year, the Army got nearly one quarter of its recruits via that program. The Navy started a similar prep program in 2023.
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.
"That's a pretty significant jump, whereas for male recruitment, we saw only an eight percent increase between fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024," Kuzminski said.
There’s no way to know yet how the new Administration might affect that trend, she said.
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.
"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," she said.
It's possible Trump’s election may have affected decisions about joining, but maybe more indirectly, Kuzminski said.
"The data shows election outcomes have more of an impact on influencers, and by that I mean parents, teachers, principals, coaches, clergy members, than it might on, say, an 18-year-old who's considering military service," she said.
Trump, meanwhile, has entirely banned one group of troops and potential recruits — transgender people — in a move that’s still playing out in the courts. If the ban is upheld, it would bar several thousand existing troops from serving and others from signing up.
The Pentagon has said at least 4,200 transgender people are in the service, and activists say there are thousands more.
Asch, the Rand Corporation analyst, said that while recruiting has improved, a higher than normal percentage of enlistees lately haven’t met some key quality standards. For example, a Department of Defense standard stipulates that at least 90% of each service branch's recruits hold high school diplomas and at least 60% score above average on the aptitude test.
"Not all the services are meeting or are on track right now to be meeting those quality marks," Ashe said. "And those quality marks matter because they're related to readiness."
Those who have graduated from high school, for example, are more likely to complete their service obligation, Asch said, while recruits with higher aptitude are more trainable, follow instructions, and do better with hands-on military tasks.
"The fact that they're still missing the mark suggests that recruiting is still a challenge right now," she said.
This story was produced by The American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
