Military Recruiting Dod Services Need Better Data To Enhance Visibility Over Recruiter Irregularities

The viability of the All Volunteer Force (AVF) depends, in large measure, on the Department of Defense's (DOD) ability to successfully recruit several hundred thousand qualified individuals each year to fill over 1,400 occupational specialties. Since the March 2003 involvement of U.S. military forces in Iraq, attracting sufficient numbers of high-quality recruits to military service has proven to be one of the greatest personnel challenges faced by DOD since the inception of the AVF. The active Army, the Army Reserve, and the Navy Reserve, for example, failed to meet their fiscal year 2005 recruiting goals. Recruitment of high-quality personnel is a tough proposition, made even more challenging in the current environment when the nation is engaged in combat operations. To exacerbate the recruitment challenges further, DOD estimates that over half of the youth in the U.S. population between the ages of 16 and 21 do not meet the minimum requirements to enter military service. Moreover, additional factors such as the shrinking numbers of new recruits in delayed entry programs and the Army Army's use of stop loss, which delays servicemembers from leaving active duty, indicate that the components may experience continued recruiting challenges as they attempt to meet their personnel requirements. To help overcome recruiting challenges, the military services during the past several years have assigned roughly 20,000 recruiters to manage their recruiting programs and achieve their accession goals.

GAO-06-846 Military Recruiting: DOD and Services Need Better Data to Enhance Visibility over Recruiter Irregularities

The viability of the All Volunteer Force depends, in large measure, on the Department of Defense's (DOD) ability to recruit several hundred thousand individuals each year. Since the involvement of U.S. military forces in Iraq in March 2003, several DOD components have been challenged in meeting their recruiting goals. In fiscal year 2005 alone, three of the eight active and reserve components missed their goals. Some recruiters, reportedly, have resorted to overly aggressive tactics, which can adversely affect DOD's ability to recruit and erode public confidence in the recruiting process. GAO was asked to address the extent to which DOD and the services have visibility over recruiter irregularities; what factors may contribute to recruiter irregularities; and what procedures are in place to address them. GAO performed its work primarily at the service recruiting commands and DOD's Military Entrance Processing Command; examined recruiting policies, regulations, and directives; and analyzed service data on recruiter irregularities.

Surveys show that the all-volunteer military is our most respected and trusted institution, but over the last thirty-five years it has grown estranged from civilian society. Without a draft, imperfect as it was, the military is no longer as representative of civilian society. Fewer people accept the obligation for military service, and a larger number lack the knowledge to be engaged participants in civilian control of the military. The end of the draft, however, is not the most important reason we have a significant civil-military gap today. A More Perfect Military explains how the Supreme Court used the cultural division of the Vietnam era to change the nature of our civil-military relations. The Supreme Court describes itself as a strong supporter of the military and its distinctive culture, but in the all-volunteer era, its decisions have consistently undermined the military's traditional relationship to law and the Constitution. Most people would never suspect there was anything wrong, but our civil-military relations are now as constitutionally fragile as they have ever been. A More Perfect Military is a bracingly candid assessment of the military's constitutional health. It crosses ideological and political boundaries and is challenging-even unsettling-to both liberal and conservative views. It is written for those who believe the military may be slipping away from our common national experience. This book is the blueprint for a new national conversation about military service.

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This book focuses exclusively on specific education policy instead of general military recruiting in high schools. "When the George W. Bush administration passed its landmark education legislation in 2001, dubbed the No Child Left Behind Act, legislators included a small section containing strict military recruiting mandates for public high schools. The law had two main provisions. First, a data sharing provision requires high schools to distribute the personal directory information of every student to all local armed forces recruiting stations on an annual basis. Second, the equal access provision requires high schools to provide military recruiters access to school grounds equal to university recruiters or career recruiters. For accountability, if these provisions are not fulfilled, the school will lose all federal education funds. Students or parents may “opt out” of the data collection through a bureaucratic process, but no such opt-out option exists for the soldiers visiting schools. When President Barack Obama renewed the omnibus education law in 2015, the name changed to the Every Student Succeeds Act, but the military mandates remained – the provisions were strengthened by including a passage prohibiting any local school board from instituting an “opt-in” bureaucratic structure for parents and students. This book focuses on how the two provisions have been met by parents, school staff, soldiers, and other individuals influenced by high school education policy and military recruiting. The central question is: do military recruiting methods utilized in public high schools work to promote the best interests of the students, or should policy makers rethink the freedom adult soldiers have when interacting with children within schools?