The U.S. Army is upping the ante with its recruiting goal this year, aiming to bring in 61,000 new soldiers by Oct. 1, 2025—about 6,000 more than in fiscal year 2024.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth announced the recruiting target on Oct. 14 during the opening ceremony for the annual Association of the United States Army conference.
The Army closed out fiscal year 2024 last month by surpassing its goal of 55,000 new recruits. After major recruiting misses in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, recruiters brought in more than 55,300 new soldiers to the Army’s active component.
The service brought in about 15,000 fewer new active component soldiers than the 60,000 it had hoped for in fiscal year 2022 and about 10,000 fewer new soldiers than the hoped-for 65,000 in fiscal 2023.
Wormuth said the lackluster 2022 and 2023 recruiting results left the Army with “no choice but to go in a full-court press to change how we recruit from top to bottom.”
The Army secretary said the service revised its recruiting school curriculum over the past year and has selected three cohorts of warrant officers to be specifically trained for recruiting missions, a first for the service. She also said the Army has partnered with private companies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning services, to identify promising recruiting leads.
Wormuth noted that the Army will continue with its Future Soldier Preparatory Course, a program to help aspiring Army recruits who fall short of minimum fitness and academic standards train to meet those standards by the time they enter the Army’s basic training program. More than 13,000 of the Army’s new trainees came in through the program in fiscal year 2024; that was about one-quarter of the total recruiting target for the year.
After a successful recruiting year, Army leaders are hoping to take on more ambitious goals.
In addition to bringing in 61,000 new recruits in fiscal 2025, Wormuth said the service hopes to place about 10,000 recruits into its delayed entry program (DEP) pool by the end of the fiscal year.
The DEP allows military recruits to commit to entering the enlistment ascension process and basic training on a specified date. Toward the end of an annual recruiting cycle, recruiters will often try to fill their service’s DEP pool with prospective recruits who can ship out in the following fiscal year, helping to kick-start their recruiting quota in the new year.
At the end of fiscal year 2024, the Army placed more than 11,000 prospective recruits in its DEP pool, which was more than double the 5,000 it had planned.
“This goal is ambitious, but [Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George] and I believe it is achievable,” Wormuth said of this year’s DEP goal.
Fiscal year 2025 could serve as a test of the secretary’s efforts to overhaul the Army’s recruiting practices.
At an April Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) noted that while the Army appeared on track to hit its fiscal year 2024 recruiting goal, that goal was notably smaller than in recent years and almost exactly matched the recruiting turnout the service had managed in the previous year.
Cotton told Wormuth that the Army appeared to have improved its recruiting in fiscal year 2024 “because you’re throwing a dart at the wall and drawing the bullseye around it.”
In addition to raising the recruiting targets for the new fiscal year, Wormuth said the Army is continuing to reconfigure its force design and implement new technology.
Overall, the Army aims to reorient from the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions of the past two decades and instead take on large-scale operations against more peer-like adversaries.
“We are eliminating tens of thousands of unfilled spaces in units that were primarily focused on [counterinsurgency] and [counterterrorism], but we are also building new formations designed and equipped to provide capabilities in short supply relative to current and future demands,” Wormuth told those attending the Association of the United States Army conference.
Among its force redesign goals, the Army secretary said the Army is specifically working to stand up more units to protect against indirect fire. She said the service is building out units tasked with countering unmanned aerial systems, or drones, which have become increasingly common on modern battlefields.
The Army secretary said the service is also standing up new multi-domain task forces (MDTF), which combine skill sets from across the air, land, sea, space, cyber, and information specialties, to enable the U.S. forces to fight more cohesively.
She said the Army has established three of five planned MDTFs, and one such task force recently completed live-fire training in the Indo-Pacific region, demonstrating the use of intelligence, space, cyber, and targeting capabilities to strike “adversaries with considerable defensive capabilities.”
