After more than 20 years of losing wars, recruiting for the US Army is now officially a mess. Last year, that service fell short of its goal by 15,000 recruits, or a quarter of its target. Despite reports of better numbers in the first months of this year, Army officials doubt they will achieve their objective this time around either.

The commanding general at Fort Jackson, the South Carolina facility that provides basic training to 50 per cent of all new members of the Army, called the recruiting command’s task the hardest since the all-volunteer military was launched in 1973. The Army’s leaders were alarmed enough to make available up to $1.2 billion for recruitment incentives and related initiatives.

Those incentives include enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000 and promotions for young enlistees who successfully bring in new candidates. Women recruits can now wear their hair in ponytails, and regulations have been updated to permit small, inconspicuous tattoos in places like the back of your ear.

The other branches of the military aren’t exactly doing well either. The Marines, for example, met their numbers largely through retention, not recruitment, and the Navy was forced to accept recruits who scored in the lowest-qualifying range on an entrance exam.

The tempo of recruitment has always swung back and forth, depending in part on whether the economy is bad or booming. Today, that economy may be a mess, but hiring is still remarkably robust, leaving high school graduates with more choices than just the Army or stocking shelves at Walmart (which, by the way, also offers college tuition assistance).

The labour market isn’t the only obstacle to filling the ranks. Covid not only kept recruiters largely out of schools – a traditional hunting ground – for a couple of years, but they also lowered the scores on military entrance exams. The Army has seen a 9 per cent decrease in scores (already low when this round of measurement began) on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), the all-important test that determines which branches of the military and which jobs you qualify for.

An oft-cited statistic – and it’s alarming, no matter how you feel about the military – is that only about 23 per cent of the Americans the Army aims to recruit qualify as physically, educationally, and mentally fit to enlist.

Then there’s what could be called the patriotic duty gap. The US is no longer officially fighting any wars (though the global war on terror, even if no longer known by that name, never really ends). The lack of a rally-round-the-flag event like 9/11, along with the calamitous military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and 20th-anniversary re-examinations of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, have left Washington wary of starting a new conflict.

Sure, tens of billions of dollars of weaponry are going to Ukraine and there are more than 900 US troops still in fighting mode in Syria, where a drone strike recently killed an American contractor and injured US troops, but we seldom hear much about such deployments or similar ones in Iraq, Niger, Somalia and other countries across much of Africa, until something goes wrong, so they’re hardly top-notch recruitment material.

Summing up the mood of the military’s present target generation, Major General Alex Fink, chief of Army enterprise marketing, observed, “They see us as revered, but not relevant in their lives.”

A year ago, an Army Career Center (aka a recruiting station) opened in my fairly affluent neighbourhood. This was curious. After all, it’s an area surrounded by elite universities and not the most welcoming high schools when it comes to the military. I had walked by the station often, noting the posters in its windows advertising career training and the benefits of the Army Reserve. There was even one in Tagalog about an expedited path to US citizenship. (And mind you, there isn’t a large Filipino population in this neighbourhood either.)

Finally, as someone who’s worked for years with antiwar GIs and wrote the book War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, I decided to drop in for a chat, only to hesitate, anticipating suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Boy, was I wrong! The four non-commissioned officers stationed there, only one of whom had spent extended time in a war zone, couldn’t have been more eager to talk about the benefits of Army life. Their spiel was good, too: career training, college tuition, some control over the first duty station you’re likely to get, housing, health care, family benefits, competitive pay, even bonuses, not to speak of 30 days off each year and substantial responsibility at a young age.

Admittedly, the tuition reimbursement offered wouldn’t faintly cover any of the universities near where I live and it takes a while for your salary to amount to much… still, it was an impressive pitch.

And they don’t take just anyone, either. Enlistment requirements are similar across the six branches of the military, except when it comes to age limits. (For the Army, you have to be between 17 and 35.) You must be a high school graduate or the equivalent, a citizen or Green Card holder, medically and physically fit, in good moral standing, and score high enough on the ASVAB entrance exam, which only about one-third of test-takers now pass. (Full disclosure: I couldn’t do the sample math questions.)

So, how’s recruiting going? The Army has about 9,000 recruiters at 1,508 locations nationwide whose pay and benefits are tied to their success. Each recruiter is responsible for signing up a minimum of one recruit for each of the 11 months they’re at work. If this had actually happened, the Army would have coasted to last year’s goal. (I can do that math.) My neighbourhood recruiters, however, seem to be typical in coming in well under that quota.

Somewhere in our friendly chat, I pointed out that armies exist to go to war. They countered that, for every infantryman in the US military, there are about 100 support personnel and pointed to wall posters advertising 130 Army career options. No one seemed inclined to delve any deeper into the subject of future battlefields.

Surely, anyone qualified to enlist in the Army should know that such forces exist for only one significant purpose: to fight wars. And the US military – with its 750 bases around the world and its unending war on terror, while the pressures between China and this country only continue to escalate – might well find itself at war again any time.

The Army’s website is clear enough on its mission: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the joint force.” But curiously enough, on its recruiting website, the topic of fighting a war doesn’t show up under “reasons to join.” The system is clearly focused instead on all the remarkably peaceful opportunities the Army offers its soldiers.

That emphasis shines forth in the resurrection this spring of the oldie (but apparently goodie) ad campaign “Be All You Can Be,” which last appeared in 2001. It has now replaced the “What’s Your Warrior” ads, with their video-game visuals and bass-heavy soundtrack.

The new campaign includes short YouTube videos, where likeably plain-spoken soldiers explain just what they appreciate about the Army. One features an Army rapper; in another, a woman talks about finding balance in her Army life, as images of soldiers with weapons and soldiers with families flash by.

Admittedly, there have been a few hiccups along the way to this gentler, hipper vision of that service. Take the two high-profile ads in the new recruitment campaign that featured actor Jonathan Majors (Antman, Creed III) and were pulled shortly after their debut when he was arrested on charges of assault, harassment, and strangulation.

Army recruits tend to come from military families (83 per cent of enlistees by one reckoning) and hometowns near military bases, where kids grow up around people in uniform and time in the military becomes part of their worldview.

Elsewhere, the military works remarkably hard to introduce that worldview. High schools receiving certain kinds of federal funding, for instance, are required to give recruiters the same access as they do colleges or employers and provide the military with contact information for all students (unless their parents opt out).

• A TomDispatch report / By Nan Levinson