The Army will not reach its "very ambitious" recruiting goal this year, the secretary of the service branch admitted on Tuesday.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday that the service would fall short of its goal of 65,000 new recruits. The Army fell roughly 15,000 active-duty troops short of its goal last year of having 60,000 new soldiers.
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"[Army Chief of Staff Gen. James C. McConville] and I set a very ambitious goal of 65,000 new recruits this year, and we are not going to make that goal," the Army secretary said.
"We are doing everything we can to get as close to it as possible, but we are going to fall short of that. ... We didn't get into this situation in a year, and I think it's going to take us more than a year" to fix the problem, Wormuth said.
The recruiting woes the Army is fighting against are felt by all the service branches except the Space Force, which Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman told lawmakers in March was "mostly associated with the fact that we have much smaller numbers to recruit and we have the ability to handpick those that decide they want to join the Space Force."
Military leaders have cited a multitude of contributing factors to the overall recruiting woes, including an increasingly growing percentage of U.S. residents who are not eligible to join the armed forces, a complete shutdown of in-school recruitment efforts in schools during the pandemic, and a growing unfamiliarity between civilians and the military.
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Back in August, the Army began a new program that was designed to help potential recruits who fall just short of meeting the service branch's requirements. Roughly 3,300 of the 4,000 applicants went to basic training, and they otherwise wouldn't have been allowed to serve in the military, according to Military.com.
The Army said that at the time the course was announced in late July 2022, only 23% of people in the United States fully met the Army’s requirements, down from 29% in recent years.