MARINE CORPS TIMES: RECRUITERS FACE TOUGH TIMES

The military services face the toughest recruiting environment in a generation, as the most recent data shows interest in military service at its lowest level in more than 25 years.

By Andrew Tilghman - Staff writerPosted : Saturday Apr 12, 2008 15:29:41 EDT
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2008/04/marine_recruiting_041208w/

Internal Defense Department surveys tracking the opinions of potential recruits — mostly young men ages 16 to 21 — show the inclination toward military service has fallen dramatically since the end of the Cold War, with an exceptionally rapid nosedive since 2004.

A long-term downward trend reversed briefly after Sept. 11, 2001, up until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But that bump has disappeared, as young men are less drawn to serve in uniform than at any time since the earliest days of the volunteer force a generation ago.

“You have a big demographic shift happening,” said Peter Singer, head of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “The future is going to hinge to the question of whether our recruiting and personnel systems can make the shifts that are necessary to recruit and retain and inspire this new generation.”

For decades, the Defense Department has tracked youth attitudes by conducting detailed surveys about who wants to enlist and why. The surveys help uniformed recruiters, and the civilian advertising firms who work with them, to effectively identify and win over the best people for the active-duty force.

The critical question on the survey is: “How likely is it that you will be serving in the military in the next few years?” The number of young men answering “definitely” or “probably” has dropped from a consistent level of more than 25 percent in the late 1980s to about 13 percent today, according to Pentagon documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.