United States Army Recruiting Command


The United States Army Recruiting Command, located at Fort Knox, Kentucky, is responsible for the recruitment and accession of new Soldiers for the United States Army and Army Reserve. Recruiting operations are conducted throughout the United States, U.S. territories, and at U.S. military facilities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. This process includes the recruiting, medical and psychological examination, induction, and administrative processing of potential service personnel.
USAREC is a major command of the United States Army, and is commanded by a Lieutenant General and assisted by a Deputy Commanding General and a Command Sergeant Major. The Command employs nearly 15,000 military and civilian personnel, the majority being Soldiers that are screened and selected to serve on recruiting duty for three to four years. Upon completing their recruiting assignment, these Soldiers can either return to their primary military occupational specialty or volunteer to remain in the recruiting career field; those that remain in the recruiting career field are considered cadre recruiters and comprise the majority of the enlisted leadership of the command, providing experience, training, and continuity to the recruiting force.

History

Revolutionary War to Civil War

Recruiting for the U.S. Army began in 1775 with the raising and training of the Continentals to fight in the American Revolutionary War. The Command traces its organizational history to 1822, when Major General Jacob Jennings Brown, commanding general of the Army, initiated the General Recruiting Service. For much of the rest of the 19th century, recruitment was left to the regimental recruiting parties, usually recruiting in their regional areas as was the practice in Europe.
Up to the commencement of the American Civil War, two types of forces existed in the United States that performed their own recruiting: those for the Regular Army, and those for the state Militia.
Due to severe shortage of troops after the first year of the war, conscription was introduced by both the Union and the Confederacy to enable continuing of operations on a thousand-mile front. Conscription was first introduced in the Confederacy by President Jefferson Davis on the recommendation by General Robert E. Lee on 16 April 1862. The United States Congress enacted by comfortable majorities the Enrollment Act of 1863 on 3 March after two weeks of debate. As a result, approximately 2,670,000 men were conscripted for federal and militia service by the Northern states.

World War I and II

The realization that volunteers could never again be depended on for service was clear in the post-war analysis, but the dependence on them prevailed until the commencement of World War I when President Woodrow Wilson, argued for America's exclusion from the European war, believed that there would be found sufficient volunteers to meet the nation's military needs. However, European experiences with industrial warfare prevailed, and two years later Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917. There were two primary reasons for President Wilson approving conscription: he recognized the efficiency and equity of the draft over the difficult-to-manage system of inducting and training volunteers, and that by opting for conscription, he realized the possibility of blocking one of his leading political critics and opponents, former President Theodore Roosevelt, from raising a volunteer force to lead in France. The Act was however very selective in that "the draft 'selected' those men the Army wanted and society could best spare: 90 percent of the draftees were unmarried, and 70 percent were farm hands or manual hands."
Conscription was again used to quickly grow the nation's small peacetime Army in 1940 into a wartime Army of more than 8.3 million personnel. However, there was a society-wide support for the conscription during World War II, in part due to efforts of the National Emergency Committee of the Military Training Corps Association led by Greenville Clark who became known as the "Father of Selective Service." The Congress, faced with imminent need to mobilize, still took three months of debate until finally passing the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 on 16 September 1940. Nearly 50 million men registered and 10 million were inducted into armed forces under the Act.
Although the STASA was extended after the war, it ended on 31 March 1947, and the Army had to turn to recruiting volunteers again, requiring and estimated 30,000 volunteers a month, but seeing only 12,000 enlisting.

Cold War

With the Cold War looming, Congress authorized the Selective Service Act of 1948 to enable President Harry S. Truman to provide for 21 months of active Federal service, with all men from ages 18 to 26 required to register. This Act was extended due to the start of the Korean War, and replaced by the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951 by revising the earlier Act. The new Act extended the president’s authority to induct citizens for four years, granted him the authority to recall reservists, lowered the draft age to 18, lengthened the term of service to two years, and cancelled deferments for married men without children.
With the end of the Korean War, the draft remained in force, but became increasingly unpopular, although it continued to encourage volunteers and selected the bare minimum of annual recruits. Repeatedly renewed by overall majorities in Congress in 1955, 1959, and 1963, its final extension in 1967 was also passed by a majority of Congress, but only after a year of hearings and public debate. During the years of the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1973, there were 1,728,254 inductions through selective service. There was, however, a direct effect on public support for the draft that was high even after the Korean War to its low in the early 1970s because draftees, who constituted only 16 percent of the armed forces, but 88 percent of infantry soldiers in Vietnam, accounted for over 50 percent of combat deaths in 1969, a peak year for casualties. Little wonder that the draft became the focus of anti-Vietnam activism.

All-Volunteer Force

With these political consequences in mind in 1969, President Nixon appointed a commission, led by former Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, "to develop a comprehensive plan for eliminating conscription and moving toward an All-Volunteer Armed Force." However, even before this commission submitted its report on 13 May 1969, President Nixon informed Congress that he intended to institute a reform that would see the draftees replaced with volunteers in his Special Message to Congress on Reforming the Military Draft. In February 1970, the Gates Commission released its favorable AVF report which stated that, "We unanimously believe that the nation’s interests will be better served by an all-volunteer force, supported by an effective stand-by draft, than by a mixed force of volunteers and conscripts; that steps should be taken promptly to move in this direction."
The U.S. military became an all-volunteer force again in 1973. To help with facilitating the transition to an all-volunteer force, the Army created District Recruiting Commands through the continental United States to direct the efforts of its recruiters among the civilian population. The DRC's became battalions in 1983.

21st Century Recruiting Challenges

Since 2014, the Army has struggled to make its yearly recruiting contract goals and has relied on a combination of late-year recruiting surges and recruits in the Army's Future Soldier Program attending basic combat training earlier than originally scheduled to make up any shortcomings. However, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 made it difficult for recruiters to access high schools and colleges which are the Army's traditional recruiting ground, followed by a strong post-pandemic economic rebound and businesses offering employee benefits comparable to those offered by military service has made the military a less attractive option for many young people. These challenges, combined with a shrinking pool of young Americans that meet the moral, physical, and education requirements to join, resulted in the Army missing its recruiting goals by nearly 15,000 soldiers in 2022 and 10,000 soldiers in 2023.
In August 2022, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth established the Army Recruiting and Retention Task Force to assess what is preventing the Army from meeting its recruiting goals and to find opportunities to inject innovative solutions and resolve long-standing challenges. Led by Maj. Gen. Deborah Kotulich, the 25-person task force worked with military leaders and civilian experts in recruitment and talent acquisition to come up with recommendations to improve the Army's accession systems and processes. October 3, 2023, the Army released the task force's recommendations to the public, which included:
  • Raising USAREC to a three-star command reporting directly to the Secretary of the Army, and extending the commanding general's time in command to four years to give them time to implement and direct changes to the force.
  • Creating two new Army MOSs, Talent Acquisition Specialist for enlisted Soldiers and Talent Acquisition Technician for warrant officers. These MOSs will eventually replace the current Recruiter MOS and end detailed recruiting assignments for Soldiers.
  • Reassign the U.S. Army Cadet Command, based at Fort Knox, and the , based in Chicago, Illinois, as subordinate commands under USAREC.
  • Focus on recruiting college-age prospects. Traditionally, the Army has focused on high school seniors and recent graduates who are looking at potential job opportunities following graduation. However, with more young people attending college and the ever-increasing use of technology in the military, the need to change who recruiters look for has increased.
  • Create an experimentation directorate within USAREC that can explore new recruitment methods and policies without the pressure of meeting recruiting goals.