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Recruitment Rises 12.5% Despite Ongoing Challenges

The Defense Department’s armed services branches hired 12.5% more people in financial year 2024 than in the year prior regardless of a difficult and indifferent recruiting market.

Katie Helland Director of Military Accessions Policy Katie Helland speaks to members of the media throughout a panel on fiscal year 2025 recruiting objectives at the Pentagon, Oct. 30, 2024.
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Credit: Flying Force Tech. Sgt. Jackie Sanders, DOD.
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While speaking at a multiservice panel on 2025 hiring concerns at the Pentagon earlier this week, Director of Military Accession Policy Katie Helland stated that the services increased the number of recruits from 200,000 in FY 2023 to 225,000 in FY 2024, which ended September 30.

Additionally, she stated, the services had a 35% boost in written agreements, referall.us and the active components’ delayed entry program started FY 2025 with a 10% bigger pool.

” [The Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the services will continue to build off the momentum that we’ve acquired in 2024,” Helland said.

” Nevertheless,” she continued, “we require to stay meticulously optimistic about the future recruiting operations as we continue to recruit in a market that has low youth tendency to serve, restricted familiarity with military chances, a competitive labor market and a declining eligibility amongst young people.”

Helland elaborated on those difficulties by discussing that, for the very first time since the metric has actually been tracked, the majority of young people have never ever thought about the choice of serving in the armed force.

The reasons behind that are multifold, Helland stated. Young Americans have fewer ties to good friends or household members who have served in the armed force. There is a declining existence of veterans in our society. Approximately 77% of people between the ages of 17 and 24 require some type of waiver to serve due to any number of disqualifications.

To counter such challenges, Helland said the military has executed a medical pilot program that allows recruits to join the military without a waiver for many health conditions – supplied they satisfy specific requirements. Additionally, there are service member prep courses that prepare recruits to meet the difficult requirements of military service. Moreover, DOD is looking for to reconnect with youth and their influencers by revealing them the worth of serving.

” The next generation of Americans to serve ought to know that there has actually never been a better time for them to pick military service,” Helland stated.

Panel Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder assists in a panel on 2025 recruiting objectives at the Pentagon, Oct. 30, 2024.
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” Youth today look for a larger function in their lives and desire jobs where they have greater participation in decision-making and can develop a direct concrete effect,” she continued. “Military service uses all of this.”

Explaining that U.S. military service provides more than 250 professions and that it represents among the most extremely informed organizations throughout the world and throughout all pay grades, Helland stated the Defense Department is striving to counter the story that joining the armed force is an alternative to participating in college or “an alternative of last option.”

” We are working to reframe this story so that Americans understand that military service is a pathway to higher education and profession opportunities while protecting democracy and the freedoms we love,” Helland said.

She included that DOD is reframing this narrative. For instance, the department’s Joint Advertising Marketing research and Studies program will soon release a campaign to build familiarity with the about the worth of military service. Plans are also continuing to have adult influencers promote for military service.