The United States Army announced on Tuesday that its recruiting numbers reached record highs in December 2024.
The Army had its most productive December in 15 years by enlisting 346 soldiers every day, or a total of 10,726 recruitments that month, according to the Pentagon.
The number compares to the 55,300 new active-duty soldiers the Army recruited during the entirety of fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30.
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The December surge comes after the Army narrowly reached its target for recruitment for the first time last September after falling short of enlistment goals for several years. The service recruited 50,181 or 76.6% of its target goal in fiscal year 2023, and 44,901 or 74.8% of the target goal in fiscal year 2022.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth credited the new Republican administration controlling the Pentagon for the surge in recruitment. A staunch critic of how the military was run under the Biden administration, Hegseth has targeted the Pentagon’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, which he argues has detracted from the military’s core mission of keeping the country safe, and has emerged as a vocal promoter of the “warfighters” ethos.
“BOTTOM LINE: America’s youth want to serve under the bold & strong ‘America First’ leadership of @realDonaldTrump,” Hegseth said Tuesday in a social media post responding to the recruitment surge.
The defense secretary, a former combat veteran, also highlighted a post commenting that “there are several young men from my hometown who were planning to go to college but have now enlisted to serve under @PeteHegseth and @realDonaldTrump! Our military will be back to full strength by the end of the year thanks to ending DEI and promoting the meritocracy!”
Per Military.com, the Army is almost halfway to meeting its goal of recruiting 61,000 soldiers during the 2025 fiscal year, which marked an ambitious target given the branch only narrowly exceeded its 55,000 goal last fiscal year. The branch has now seen 30,000 new enlistments, marking a steep increase from 6,000 in the same period last year.
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In order to train the growing ranks of recruits, the Army is expected to establish 10 new basic training units located across Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a move that would free the service to train up to 9,600 new soldiers annually.
The Trump administration has announced a series of executive actions affecting the military, including reinstating soldiers forced to leave the service after refusing to comply with federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates, changes to policies regarding transgender people in the military, and a general overhaul of DEI policies, including promoting meritocracy over “race-based and sex-based discrimination within the Armed Forces of the United States.”