With the U.S. military having recently faced what the Pentagon warned was its most serious personnel shortage in half a century, recruitment is now solidly on the rise.
President Donald Trump – who has regularly called on the military for both domestic and foreign matters since returning to office – attributes the turnaround to a surge in patriotism inspired by his election and new defense leaders who are rooting out what they decry as “wokeness” in the ranks.
Defense analysts, meanwhile, offer a different explanation. They cite measures taken years ago that are now bearing fruit, including pay raises, accelerated pathways to citizenship, and programs to coach recruits with lagging academic or fitness scores.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump has focused on building military strength. Attracting new soldiers has required extra effort.
Trump administration officials say that, in any case, the recent gains must be studied and understood to be maintained. To this end, the Department of Defense in June launched a Military Service Recruitment Task Force. Its recommendations are due in mid-August.
“The [recruitment] numbers are great now,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said at a June press briefing. “But six months from now, we’ll see.”
Why did recruiting drop off in the first place?
The U.S. military’s challenges began making headlines after the Army missed its recruitment goal by about 25% in fiscal year 2022. With a goal of 60,000 new soldiers, it had signed up just 45,000.
One factor, analysts said, was the isolation rules of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which U.S. military services temporarily halted basic training efforts. Many high schools were also closed during this time to both students and military recruiters.
“We had to pull out of communities for almost two years,” said Katie Helland, the Pentagon’s top recruiting official, in a discussion with reporters last October. “It takes time to get back in and develop those relationships again.”
Following the pandemic lockdown, aspiring recruits’ scores on military entrance tests dropped, and rates of obesity and mental health diagnoses increased.
Today, defense officials report that more than three-quarters of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 cannot qualify for military service without a waiver, an exception that allows individuals to serve despite disqualifying factors.
The inclination for young people to join the armed services also decreased. In a Department of Defense survey published in March of this year, some 87% of those between the ages of 16 and 21 said they were probably – or definitely – not planning to serve in the military. Two out of 3 said that they were concerned about the emotional or psychological impact of war, and almost 3 out of 4 cited concerns about the possibility of physical injury or death.
For the first time since the Pentagon began tracking the metric, the majority of youth, as one official put it, “never even considered military service as an option.”
At the same time, historically low unemployment rates for young people created stiff competition from the private sector for talent.
When and why did recruitment start to rebound?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has credited President Trump’s election with what he and other administration officials have called the “Trump bump” for military recruitment.
“They see leadership … that says, ‘We want you to be warriors. We’re not doing this politically correct garbage anymore. We’re doing war fighting,” Secretary Hegseth said on a visit to Normandy, France, in June to honor the 81st anniversary of D-Day.
In fact, Pentagon figures show that military enlistments began bouncing back between October 2023 and September 2024 – before Mr. Trump was elected – rising by about 12.5%.
Starting in 2023, Congress passed three straight basic pay raises for troops, amounting to between 4.5% and 5.2% annually. Another 10% pay increase for junior enlistees – those in the lowest service ranks – went into effect this past April, adding an additional $3,000 to $6,000 per year to the pockets of each of those new soldiers.
These hikes marked the largest increases in troops’ basic pay in two decades. The annual base salaries for new troops have increased from about $22,000 in 2022 to nearly $28,000 in 2025.
Since 2017, the services have also spent more on recruiting and retention bonuses, particularly for tougher-to-fill jobs, such as in cyber specialties.
In part to help address the impact of isolation during the pandemic, the Army also created preparatory courses starting in 2022 to ready recruits for basic training. The Navy later did the same. Graduates of these courses now account for about one-quarter of all Army enlistments.
“The services and Congress really put a tremendous amount of attention in terms of various policies and reforms, and we saw an improvement,” says Beth Asch, a senior principal economist who specializes in military staffing at the Rand think tank.
By October 2024, enlistments were up 60% over the previous year. In March of this year, the services welcomed 13,000 new recruits – nearly 50% more than at the same time last year, but still fewer than the 16,800 recorded in January 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, and the 20,000 recorded in August 2024 under President Joe Biden.
“That doesn’t mean the [presidential] election didn’t have an impact,” Dr. Asch says. “It’s just whatever improvements were happening were already on their way at the end of fiscal year 2024,” which ended Sept. 30.
Will the positive trajectory continue?
Due in part to its success and lowered recruiting goals last year, the Army now has a surplus of some 11,000 applicants awaiting basic training, nearly double the number from the previous year. The Air Force’s surplus is the highest it’s been in a decade.
In response, the Army is creating 10 more basic training units to train an additional 10,000 new soldiers each year.
The surplus recruits from 2024 will count toward this year’s Army goal of bringing in 60,000 new soldiers. This past June, the Army announced that it had reached its target months ahead of schedule.
After lowering its goals – as the Army did – during the recruiting slump, the Air Force reversed course and increased its recruiting goals by 20% for 2025. Though it later dialed that goal back to an 11% increase, the Air Force met that goal three months ahead of schedule. The Space Force increased its recruiting goals as well.
Though it didn’t increase its recruiting goals, the Navy has already met its targets for the year, too. So has the Marine Corps.
Analysts are eyeing whether the recruitment and retention of women and minority forces will be affected by the Trump administration’s movement away from diversity, equity, and inclusion measures. Women constitute almost 18% of active-duty forces, while Black and Hispanic troops, respectively, make up about 20% and 18% of the force.
How are the services reaching out to young people?
Air Force officials have noted the success of a 2023 program that offers foreign-born recruits an accelerated path to citizenship. Recruits can complete paperwork and take citizenship tests immediately upon entering basic training. By the time they graduate 7 1/2 weeks later, they can be sworn in as citizens.
Marine Corps recruiters similarly tout an immigration benefit that grants temporary legal status and protection from deportation to unauthorized immigrants who are family members of U.S. citizens serving in the military. However, amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the Marine Corps reportedly told its recruiters to stop promoting this program, known as parole in place, earlier this summer.
Navy leaders have also created new career specialties, such as robotics, which they say are appealing to young people. The service has also been trying to improve sailors’ quality of life through initiatives that include everything from 24/7 access to gyms to better parking.
“There has been an explosion in retention, which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention. It’s been historically high in all the services,” in large part because of the generous military benefits, Dr. Asch says. These include housing allowances, college tuition for family members, and medical care.
At the same time, the Pentagon is launching social media campaigns to target “parents, educators, and other relevant adult influencers to build advocacy for military service.” It is also developing experimental “prospecting” tools that use artificial intelligence “to enhance recruiter efficiency.”
The Defense Department’s new Recruitment Task Force is bringing together data analysts, lawyers, and recruiters working in the field. Their mission: to provide insights “that will outlast this president,” Mr. Parnell said, “and be a tool subsequent presidents and secretaries can use.”
The task force plans to tackle, among other things, the backlog of medical waivers that military doctors can grant for conditions like childhood asthma and gestational diabetes, a diagnosis given to some 10% of pregnant women in the United States.
The waivers currently take an average of six months to process across the services, said Mr. Parnell, who is co-chairing the task force. “And by that time [recruits] have got another job.”
