Officials temper Hegseth claim of Army recruiting renaissance under Trump

As the Army celebrated its 250th birthday with an elaborate parade Saturday through the streets of Washington, D.C., the service is also touting an epic recruiting turnaround, reaching its annual goal of 61,000 new recruits four months early after falling short by 10,000 soldiers just two years prior.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been quick to take credit for the recruiting surge. Hegseth, who has championed a “warrior ethos” and waged war on diversity initiatives – saying they promote divisions in the armed forces – this month described a “morale shift” starting at Trump’s inauguration.

Seeking confirmation from top service leaders, Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., pressed generals in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 5 to make an overt connection. “The ‘Trump bump’ of recruitment is obviously real,” Banks said.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George demurred, suggesting that following bleak years of recruiting shortfalls Army leaders in 2022 began pumping money and new strategies into its recruiting operation. Reducing the number of cumbersome forms, how recruiters are selected and other solutions, he said, were part of the way forward.

“We have seen recruitment numbers come up a little bit,” George said, when asked whether Trump’s election in November made an impact.

At a Northern Virginia Army recruiting office, they are seeing a different kind of impact, even as recruiters continue to work toward an unmet local accessions goal. While most prospective enlistees still cite steady pay and military benefits as reasons for interest in military service, about 1 in 3 articulate conservative views or favorably refer to the military’s leadership under Trump.

“Those people are much more likely, in my experience, to be people who are coming to us to join a combat job, rather than desk jobs,” said Jake, an Army recruiter there who spoke on the condition he only be identified by his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “I think the people who are interested in the more combat-oriented career fields are more concerned about who’s making decisions (and) the overall strategic vision of what we’re going for.”

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion article, without citing data or studies, that the recruiting bump “reflects something deeper, a resurgence of pride in our country.”

Other Army officials and military analysts, however, have been more guarded about giving Trump credit for the recruiting gains. But if data does continue to bear out a shift in sentiment among new recruits attributable at least in part to a change in governance, that may raise new concerns about the military’s self-avowed apolitical status and how to sustain a national commitment to service through changing administrations.

Katherine Kuzminski, who led a survey effort on interest in military service for the Center for a New American Security, cautioned that the era of President Joe Biden – in which COVID-19 caused accessions to plummet, coupled with the ignominious end of the two-decade U.S. war in Afghanistan – may have soured young Americans on the armed services.

These short-term shocks, Kuzminski said, came as Americans’ trust in institutions continued a long decline and as recruiters grappled with an ever-smaller pool of prospective recruits who met basic fitness and academic qualifications.

An Army official familiar with the recruiting strategy said the groundwork for recent successes goes back further than the election. The Army has used artificial intelligence through a program called Recruit 360 to generate better leads for recruiters, the official said, and is expanding an effort to help military hopefuls improve their testing and physical fitness.

The Army official voiced skepticism that Trump’s election could be adequately measured as an impetus to enlist.

“There’s always a massive range of why people join,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing recruitment efforts.

Madison Bonzo, a spokeswoman for Army Recruiting Command, said that 11,000 of the 61,000 recruits the service is now celebrating enlisted last fiscal year through the delayed entry program.

A third of the total – about 20,000 – have signed contracts in the same delayed entry program and have not yet left for basic training. The Army expects those soldiers to depart for training by the fall, said Lt. Col. Orlandon Howard, a spokesperson for the service.

The granting of waivers for those who have a disqualifying condition is also on the rise in a deliberate effort to boost recruiting. Howard said waivers were granted to about 35% of Army accessions in fiscal 2024, up from 29% the previous year. He did not provide waiver data for the current fiscal year.

But other officials aren’t discounting the Trump effect. The head of the Defense Department’s internal polling agency, Jeremy Hall, employed a metric cribbed from the business world: “Vibe is a KPI,” or key performance indicator.

Two defense officials who spoke with the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing recruiting efforts said that propensity to serve, a metric continually assessed by the Pentagon’s polling agency, Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies, surged by three percentage points in December among 16 to 24-year-olds, indicating that up to 1 million additional young people have said they’re likely to join the military within the next few years.

As of April, the official said, that interest had dropped about one percentage point, settling at a “propensity rate” of around 11%. Meanwhile, military accessions are up since November in what the two officials called “the highest recruiting percentage of mission achieved in 30 years.”

Increases since late last year appear driven at least in part by a more positive perception of military pay compared with civilian pay, one of the officials said. Congress passed a 4.5% raise for troops starting Jan. 1, even as overall economic uncertainty began to creep upward. It was the third consecutive year of pay bumps over 4%.

Pentagon surveys don’t cover political leanings, and thus wouldn’t directly capture sentiments around what some Trump officials have termed a military malaise under Biden. Conservatives castigated the previous administration over the chaotic and abrupt departure from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Pentagon’s promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Impacts on those who might feel disenfranchised by recent policy changes, such as ethnic minorities and women, have been slow to materialize. Defense officials said they’ve seen a 2% uptick among female youths in propensity to serve, but otherwise no notable demographic trends.

In the Army, according to data provided by Lt. Col. Howard, minority accessions are at a five-year high, with female recruiting up nearly 2 percentage points; African American accessions up 2.5%; and Hispanic accessions up by 0.8%.

John Cordle, a recently retired human factors engineer for the Navy, said policy changes such as a recent crackdown on permissions to grow facial hair, an allowance disproportionately granted to Black service members due to a common skin condition, may take a year or more to manifest in military departures or enlistment dips.

But all Americans should be concerned about political winds driving interest in military service, said Kevin Wallsten, a political science professor at California State University at Long Beach, who has surveyed veterans over the last several years on their political leanings.

“There’s no free lunches anymore, because the left side of the American political spectrum is going to sort of zig while the right zags,” he said. “And if you care about military recruitment, you want there to be a stable, fairly predictable approach to recruitment that’s not dependent on who sits in the White House.”