A new RAND research report looked at what happened to military recruiting and retention of enlisted personnel in FY2020 and how the COVID-19 pandemic generally affected the military. Unforeseen circumstances can have a short and long term impact on the readiness of the U.S. military.
Recruitment and Retention for the U.S. Military
High unemployment rates like what was seen in the early months of the pandemic often can lead to higher recruitment and retention rates. And while retention overall did increase, military recruiters also faced the challenge of not being able to meet with people in person and having to come up with a plan for basic trainings that overall led to lower accession in every branch. Because of the challenges of bringing in new recruits, the military focused on keeping current members or recruiting those who had already separated to meet their force strength goals.
One other interesting result from the pandemic is that in all the branches except the Navy, a greater proportion of enlistment contracts were signed by individuals with a Tier 1 education credential and Armed Force Qualification Test scores in Categories I-IIIA. The Navy had generally the same quality of candidates as it had in past years. The military as a whole also met all of their accessional goals in FY2020, with the Marine Corps being the only branch to miss their goal by less than two hundred members. The only branch to increase the number of accessions was the Navy who increased their numbers by 1.5%. All other branches had substantial decreases from FY19. The Army decreased by 10%, the Marine Corps by 11.2%, and the Air Force by 18.3%.
Recruiting Changes and Challenges
The pandemic forced the military change how they recruited members and this new format of online recruiting was expected to have a bigger impact on recruiting numbers. But instead, it was the disruption of having to change training requirements and dates to allow for safe training to continue during the pandemic that had the biggest impact. Also, a number of recruits had to shift their dates based on both the military’s changes along with their personal level of safety in deciding if they were ready to attend training.
Because of the challenges around recruiting and how the drop would overall affect the end strength of the Army, Navy and Air Force, enlistment contracts were extended. Retention increased the most among retirement eligible personnel. Those who had met retirement eligibility decided to extend their service instead of leaving the military due to challenges that were happening within the private sector. The Marine Corps struggled with retention due to the pandemic and reorganizational changes with shifting end strength goals.
One other thing the Army did to combat the challenges they faced among recruiting new members was to increase the number of prior service contracts. And although they increased between FY19 and FY20, it was not as high as in FY18.
Meeting End Strength Goals
Even with the challenges faced by the pandemic, the military was able to meet their end strength goal by focusing on retention as new enlistment contracts decreased. The research by RAND just begins to answer some of the questions around retention and recruitment. More research would need to be done for a complete analysis of the effect of COVID-19 on military recruiting and retention.
