Washington, (Samajweekly) The US Army that won the war for the allies against the axis powers has shrunk to its lowest size since World War II for want of new recruits and political interference by some Congressmen has held up filling up 64 high ranking positions.
The size of the US Army has reportedly become the smallest since World War II as the US armed forces struggle to recruit new soldiers, media reports said adding per estimate of US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin any further holdup on new military nominations could jeopardise national security leading to the loss of high-ranking officials in the Army and National Security Agency.
Some 64 three- and four-star nominations would become vacant, a report claimed.
Army officials announced on Tuesday the US armed forces had recruited almost 55,000 new would-be soldiers in the 2023 fiscal year ending Saturday, falling short by 10,000 of the publicly stated goal of 65,000.
The number of new recruits allows the service to meet its required total strength of 452,000 active-duty soldiers, reports said.
Military Times, an Independent group, says that this is the smallest the Army has been since 1940.
There were just over 2,69,000 soldiers in 1940, but that number ballooned to almost 1.5 million in 1941, the year the US entered World War II, according to the National WWII Museum’s website.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Gen. Randy George, its chief of staff, said the service is going to overhaul its recruiting strategies following years of sluggish movement in enlistment targets.
Last year in 2022, it fell short of its recruiting target by about 15,000.
“A new professional force of recruiters will be formed, instead of using soldiers who have been randomly assigned the job,” they said as quoted by the US media Newsweek.
“We are going to start using an aptitude test to make sure that the folks that we bring into the recruiting workforce have the kind of skills and attributes to be successful in what is a pretty challenging responsibility,” Wormuth told reporters during a briefing on Tuesday.
“It’s going to be a multi-year journey to get that in place but we’re going to try to start moving down that road as rapidly as we can.”
The Army has long relied heavily on high-school seniors and graduates to fill its ranks, but Wormuth said that pool is shrinking and the service needs to focus on people who are in college or job-hunting.
High-school graduates make up just 15 to 20 per cent of the labor market, Wormuth stated while the Army gets about half of its recruits from that shrinking pool.
She said she wanted a third of the Army’s recruits to have at least a high-school diploma by 2028. One fifth of the recruits currently have more than a high-school education degree.
“The high-school market is still going to be very important to us,” Wormuth said, adding: “But we’re going to formally assign our recruiters the responsibility to get a third of their new contracts from more than high-school graduates.”
The Navy and the Air Force also fell short of their recruitment targets in the 2023 fiscal year, while the Marine Corps and the small Space Force said they would meet their enlistment targets, Newsweek quoted media reports to say.
Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that a months-long holdup on new military nominations could jeopardize national security and lead to the loss of high-ranking officials in the Army and National Security Agency, media reports said.
At the same time last fall, the US Department of Defense (DoD) announced that it would implement multiple new policies intended to fill gaps in reproductive care for service members and their families. This was based on a memorandum issued by Lloyd Austin.
