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Shaky economy helps recruiting, retention

The bad news on Wall Street is good news for military recruiting and retention, the Pentagon’s top personnel official said Friday.

“We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society,” said David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in a Pentagon briefing. “That is a situation where more are willing to give us a chance. I think that’s the big difference — people willing to listen to us.”

But while the downturn in the economy is making it easier for the services to recruit and retain people, Chu said he doesn’t expect spending on enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses to drop in the near term, even though more may see the military as a shelter against a sagging civilian job market.

Although there is a lag time in the variables that drive bonus payments up or down, Chu said he expects the military “will probably spend in fiscal year 2009 … roughly what we spent in fiscal 2008.”

Recruiting bonuses in fiscal 2008 for all the services totaled roughly $750 million, Chu said.

“I would expect we’d spend something close to that in 2009,” he said. “But only time will tell.”

Chu touted fiscal 2008, which ended Sept. 30, as “probably the strongest recruiting year we’ve had, overall, taking all elements into account, since fiscal year 2004.”

All the services, including the reserve components, met their fiscal 2008 goals for the overall number of recruits they sought to sign up.

Chu said retention also “continues strong.”

While the Marines Corps didn’t make its “extraordinarily ambitious target” for first-term re-enlistments, it still ended the year at 105 percent of its authorized end strength.

In recruiting, the Marines led the way by making 100 percent of its fiscal 2008 goal. The Corps’ recruiting chief, Maj. Gen. Robert Milstead, attributed the success to the addition of 600 Marines recruiters on the streets.

The Navy’s recruiting and retention efforts were “green across the board” and the best results in five years, said Rear Adm. Joseph Kilkenny, the Navy’s recruiting chief.

The Navy was particularly successful in recruiting for its special operations forces, a performance that Kilkenny called “unprecedented.”

The Air Force made 100 percent of its recruiting target, but did not make its re-enlistment goals — what Chu described as “some softness” in retention in that service.

The reason, he said, was that in the midst of “very aggressive” end-strength cuts, the Air Force “was not very ambitious about its retention” and cut back on reenlistment incentives.

Senior Pentagon officials eventually halted that drawdown, but “turning that around takes time,” he said.

The Air Force did end the fiscal year at 99.6 percent of its authorized end strength, he said.

Almost all service components met the Pentagon’s self-imposed benchmarks for recruit quality.

The benchmark for the percentage of recruits who have high-school diplomas is 90 percent. All components met that goal except the active Army, which came in at 83 percent — although Chu noted that was up from 79 percent the year before — and the Army Reserve, at 89 percent.

The Army National Guard came in at 91 percent.

“We aim high to be above average,” Chu said.

The Army National Guard and Army Reserve were the only components to miss another benchmark — recruits who score above the 50th percentile on the military’s entrance exam. The benchmark is 60 percent; the Army Guard was at 59 percent, the Army Reserve at 58 percent.

The quality of recruits became a sore subject in the past two years for the Army, which, like the Marine Corps, is amid a congressionally authorized growth spurt during two wars.

The Army granted waivers for medical issues and for behavioral issues, such as criminal records, to almost one out of every five recruits in fiscal 2008 — a trend that Chu said was about the same as the year before.

Chu said the most common past criminal offense in such waivers is drug use. The services have had different policies in this area, which has led to problems managing and tracking data on this issue; Chu said the Pentagon is now standardizing those disparate policies.

Milstead said the Marine Corps granted waivers to 46 percent of its recruits in fiscal 2008.

“We require a waiver for one-time, experimental marijuana use,” he said. “The other services don’t. So you don’t take the waivers and look at them across the board.”

Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, the Army’s recruiting chief, took a positive tack, saying waivers are “an opportunity for when a young man or woman has made a mistake in their life [to] overcome that mistake [and] serve.”

“If it’s a serious misconduct, it goes through 10 different levels of adjudication before it reaches a general officer that must make the decision.”

The Army allowed 511 recruits with felony convictions to enlist last fiscal year, Bostick said.

“This year, that number’s down to 372,” he said, adding that many of the felonies are not of the most serious variety.

In addition, Bostick said an Army study of 17,000 such soldiers showed that they get promoted and reenlist at higher rates and receive, on average, more awards for valor than the average soldier, although they also have “slightly higher” incidents of misconduct.

Bostick said he foresees an increase in medical waivers and a decrease in misconduct waivers in the new fiscal year.

Still, he said, “I’m confident that we have a very high quality force.”

It’s possible that the poor economy could drive more higher-quality candidates to enlist, allowing a reduction in the number of waivers, Chu said, although he noted that the bulk of waivers “are on issues like acknowledged drug use.”

“That’s a social issue, and is not necessarily going to be affected by the economy,” he said.