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Economic hard times are a driving force in what the Department of Defense is calling the best recruitment year since 1973. "We're pleased to report that for the first time since the advent of the all-volunteer force, all of the military components, active and reserve, met their number as well as their quality goals.… [T]hat's the first time that's been achieved for every component since the start of the all-volunteer force in 1973," said Bill Carr, head of personnel for the Department of Defense. In his October report on 2009 recruitment, he attributed part of the success to high unemployment rates in the US, in addition to increased spending on recruits and better military salaries. ACROSS THE SERVICES, THE MILITARY MET all its goals and, after years of lowering standards during the peak of fighting in Iraq, this past year attracted one of the most educated groups to the military in nearly a decade. All the services modestly exceeded their recruiting goals, with the Army having the most success, making 108 percent of its target. In sum, the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force brought in nearly 169,000 new recruits, while the National Guard and Reserve forces brought in about 138,000. There is some question as to the significance of the military's record-level recruiting year. Some have pointed out that the services exceeded their goals only after lowering them, so in actuality fewer people joined the military this year than last. However, the military has also managed to attract an undeniably more qualified core of recruits. The number of Army recruits with a high school degree was up 11 percentage points from last year. Across the services, 96 percent of recruits had a high school diploma, the strongest percentage since 1996. Additionally, the services saw the best showing on their math and verbal aptitude test since 2004 with 73 percent of recruits scoring above average. For the US military, high unemployment rates have always meant a good thing for recruiting, says Lindsay Cohn, a political science professor who specializes in military personnel issues at the University of Northern Iowa. As far back as the Civil War, people have been turning to the military when the job market goes south. "All kinds of people are losing their jobs, and all kinds of people of different levels of education and different levels of experience are going to look to the military to support their family," she says. "So you also get a quality spike when [an economic crisis] happens." THAT QUALITY SPIKE IS NOTICEABLE, says Sgt. Greg Grayson, commander at the downtown Boston Army recruitment office where a jovial crew of soldiers in camouflage and several life-size cutouts of smiling soldiers greet visitors. "There has definitely been an increase in degree-credentialed applicants," he says. "They're done with school and the job market is not what they thought it was going to be."

Recruiting and retention are sensitive to the state of the economy. Studies indicate that a 10 percent decrease in the civilian unemployment rate will reduce high-quality enlisted recruiting by 2–4 percent. Retention also declines when unemployment decreases, but appears to be less sensitive to the state of the economy than recruiting. The recent economic downturn has improved recruiting and retention and has allowed the services to reduce use of enlistment and reenlistment bonuses. However, this improvement is expected to diminish as civilian economic conditions improve.

COLORADO SPRINGS — The Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals this year, the first time it has done so since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago. The shortfall is due in part to a hot job market that has lured away many recruits at a time that President Trump and Congress seek to expand the military, and have raised the number the Army needs to meet. The Army hoped to bring in about 76,500 new soldiers this year. But with the fiscal year ending this month, it is still 6,500 troops short, even after spending an extra $200 million on bonuses and lowering standards to let in more troops with conduct or health issues. On top of having to compete with a robust economy, with an unemployment rate below 4 percent, the Army must pick from what it says is a shrinking pool of eligible recruits. More than two-thirds of young adults do not qualify for military service because of poor physical fitness or other issues such as drug use, according to the Army. “You have fewer people who can serve, they have more opportunities in the job market, that makes it very hard on the Army,” said Beth Asch, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation who studies military recruiting.

The evidence found in numerous empirical studies suggests that both recruiting and retention are significantly influenced by the state of the civilian economy. The civilian economy affects recruiting and retention in at least two ways: through the availability of civilian employment, as measured by the civilian unemployment rate; and by the potential earnings offered by the civilian sector, as measured by average civilian earnings. As the U.S. economy improves we can expect that the declining civilian unemployment rate and rising civilian real earnings will pose challenges for recruiting and for retention.

Enlistment had reportedly been strong before the pandemic shutdown recruiting stations and forced the process onto the internet. The Army had signed up 2,200 more recruits by March 2020, matching the total for the same time frame in 2019. Recruiters now find themselves roughly 4,000 contracts short of their projected goal.

The nation’s soaring unemployment numbers could play to the advantage of the military, according to the Army Times, which says Army retention is about 15% higher than expected right now.

[Roberto Camacho, Chicano freelance multimedia journalist who focuses on criminal justice reform, immigration, Chicano/Latino issues, hip-hop culture, and their intersections to social justice] 4/18/22, “Marginalized students pay the price of military recruitment efforts”, accessed 7/2/2022, https://prismreports.org/2022/04/18/marginalized-students-military-recruitment/ - JR

The U.S. military utilizes a number of different recruitment methods to garner new enlistments, but their target audience has consistently remained the same: high schoolers, particularly young men from low-income and rural areas. Eighteen is the youngest age one can join the military without parental permission, but the armed forces still regularly market military propaganda in schools. Although the military does enjoy support within the public system, a grassroots movement of students, teachers, parents, and organizations has led efforts to reduce military recruitment presence and activities on high school campuses.

[Aina Marzia, independent journalist who has been featured in Prism Reports, BElatina News, The Austin Chronicle, Muslim Girl, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language, and The City Magazine] 9/6/2022, “How Counter-Recruiters Take on the U.S. Military”, accessed 7/2/2023, https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2022/09/06/military-recruitment-youth-of-color%EF%BF%BC - JR

Year after year, the same foldable table is propped up near the entrance of a high school gym. People with the same uniform but different faces, all eager to tell you about a new “opportunity,” will sit idly at the table. There will be a sign in front of the table and a clipboard on top, ready to jot down any name that will take the bait being offered.

[Michael Springer-Gould, MSc Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializing in immigrant/refugee rights, wartime humanitarian intervention and military analysis. Former Pitzer College graduate with a BA in Human Rights Analysis, Sociology and Spanish] 2020, [“The Weaponization of Poverty: An Investigation Into United States Military Recruitment Practices In High Schools Of Low-Income Communities In The Inland Empire”, Pitzer Senior Theses Issue 110, Pg 18], https://.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1117&context=pitzer_theses - JR

However, taking a step back from the glamorous appeals of Hollywood and technology, another critical aspect of the military’s public image is the idea of what benefits individuals would receive should they choose to enlist. In previous discussions of the JROTC, the instilment of valuable skills such as leadership and a strong work ethic were touched upon as potential motivating factors for students to join the program. Additionally, “defenders of the JROTC… claim that the goal is leadership and citizen development, drop-out prevention, or simply the fun of dressing up and parading around” 48 . It appears that the military is heavily reliant on recruits seeing service as an opportunity to become a “better version” of themselves while enjoying their lives in the process. Bettering oneself in the military, according to Marshall and Brown (2004), is best achieved through the benefits it pitches such as “financial rewards, social prestige [and] job training…” 49 . In exchange, all the military asks is “a commitment of an extended period of time, conformity to a structured lifestyle and obedience to a formal command structure”50 . Military service is essentially presented as a low-risk and highly structured program to help one grow as a person through the acquisition of socio-economic assets to which they i may have not otherwise had the opportunity to access.

One of the most straightforward explanations for inequality in wartime death is inequality in who serves in the military. For more than fifty years, an extensive literature at the crossroads of sociology, history, economics, and political science has investigated military manpower policies and changes in them over time.53 Today, a small percentage of Americans serve in the military.54 This has led to a civil-military gap along a number of dimensions.55 Men and women join the military for many reasons; for many, patriotism and a desire to serve are undoubtedly key factors. Yet an extensive literature also documents the critical importance of economic incentives in spurring enlistments throughout American history.56 At the aggregate level, a number of studies have demonstrated strong correlations between the health of the economy and patterns in military enlistments. For example, in a 1994 RAND study of the factors correlated with the successful recruitment of high quality enlistments from 1978 to 1993, two of the factors with the greatest influence on the number of high quality recruits obtained by the Army were the youth unemployment rate and the rate of military pay growth relative to the civilian sector.57

This linkage continues to the present day. Reflecting on the surge in military enlistments during the economic troubles of 2008, which followed immediately on the heels of two of the most difficult recruiting years in recent memory in 2006 and 2007, Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness David S.C. Chu readily acknowledged the faltering economy’s role in boosting volunteering: “We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society.”58 Other analyses of enlistment decisions at the individual level demonstrate, logically, that the young men and women most likely to volunteer are those for whom the occupational and educational benefits that the military affords are most appealing compared to their options in the civilian labor market.59 As summarized by military historian Peter Karsten, “Most volunteers, today and for the past 200 years, joined the service in order to gain economic rewards, social mobility, or skills needed later in civilian life.

Effects of Health Insurance and Medical Care Inflation on Voluntary Enlistment in the Army: An Empirical Study in the United States

Cebula, Richard J. International Journal of Management; Poole28.1 (Mar 2011): 349-362,395.

Richard J. Cebula Department of Economics Armstrong Atlantic State University Usha Nair-Reichert Department of Economics Georgia Institute of Technology, Kyle Taylor Department of Economics Armstrong Atlantic State University , Does a Lack of Health Insurance Elicit an Increase in the Rate of Voluntary Military Enlistment in the U.S.? The ”Military Health Care Magnet Hypothesis,” 1974-2007 In International Business Research http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.669.7114&rep=rep1&type=pdf

This study addresses the following question: “Does the unavailability of health insurance act as a incentive for persons to enlist in the military?” Within a cost-benefit framework, the present study endeavors to provide insight into this issue, referred to here as the “Military Health Care Magnet Hypothesis”. The OLS and 2SLS results provide substantial evidence that the greater the percentage of the civilian population without health insurance, the greater the rate of enlistment in the U.S. Army. Voluntary enlistment in the U.S. Army also is positively impacted by a greater presence of military veterans (which “promotes” enlistment). Furthermore, it is negatively impacted by a more rapidly growing economy (a proxy for higher opportunity costs) and military conflicts/wars (risk-averse behavior with military conflict being a risk factor that elevates the expected probability of being wounded or killed). Thus, the AVMF (all-voluntary military force) market appears to function as the free enterprise system would expect. Finally, it may be worthy of note that if the “Military Health Care Magnet Hypothesis” is valid, then it logically follows that if a system of de facto universal health care is in fact instituted in the U.S., there may be unforeseen externalities from a military recruitment perspective. In particular, implementation of universal health care would naturally result in a decline in the expected gross benefits of enlistment. This is because would-be enlistees will factor the same into their cost-benefit analysis of whether to enlist. Clearly, as the AVMF market factors the availability of universal health care outside the confines of the military into its marginal enlistment decision calculus, for many the expected net benefits (of enlisting) will decline sufficiently as to create a no-enlist decision. In turn, it follows that some form of additional incentives will be needed in order to induce sufficient recruitment/enlistment. We contribute to the debate on universal health care coverage by pointing out the possibility for an unintended consequence, namely a decline in military enlistment. Thus if universal health care is instituted, it could increase the cost of military recruitment in the future.

(A Comparison of Marketing Techniques Among Military Recruiters McCullough, Paul V., III PhD in Business Admin Walden College. Walden University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2016.)

Health insurance. Further proof of the benefits of military service comes from Cebula (2011), who explored the lack of health insurance in the United States to determine the effect of this nationwide problem on enlistment in the military. He discovered a positive correlation between enlistment and the medical care inflation rate, providing strong support for the Army health care magnet hypothesis, according to which Army enlistment increases as the percentage of Americans without health insurance increases. In addition, he stated an increased presence of military veterans also leads to growth in enlistment, because veterans promote military service. Cebula (2011) commented, however, if universal health care could have an adverse impact on military recruiting if universal health care ever becomes available in the United States. Although no proof of this hypothesis currently exists, the military may have to adjust its recruiting strategy upon the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010. In the interim, however, Wu, Henne, and Propst (2012) demonstrated the large financial benefits of the military health care system. They explored the Family Act, a proposed addition to the Tricare medical system, targeted for infertility treatments, introduced to the Senate on May 12, 2011. Wu et al. discovered upon implementation of the Family Act, medical expense deductions could exceed 7.5% of adjusted gross income per year, with a maximum lifetime credit of $13,360. This new law could also result in an increase of in vitro fertilization procedures at military treatment facilities by as much as 29% and reduce patient medical expenses for the procedure by 50% (Wu et al., 2012). For couples in the military that desire to have children but have struggled with fertility issues, the Family Act provides military families access to fertility treatments that may help individuals realize their dreams without spending excessive sums of money. Compensation. The compensation service members receive for performing their duty, through cash, noncash, and deferred payments, is another financial benefit of military service. According to Hosek et al. (2012), funding for military personnel has risen by 45% since 2000, an increase greater than the Consumer Price Index or Employment Cost Index during the same period. Hosek et al. suggested military compensation now exceeds the 70th percentile threshold, compared to civilians in equivalent jobs, who experienced a 4% to 8% decrease in pay in recent years. A career in the military also stands as an anomaly in today’s society, with an assured pension after 20 years of active federal service, which provides 50% of the average of what the service member earned in base pay during the last 3 years of service. The military also provides free health care to service members and their families, whereas the cost of health care for civilians has increased substantially. Hosek et al. suggested these benefits have become too costly and require reform. Until Congress changes the law, however, these benefits certainly provide valuable incentives for anyone considering military service.

As shown in equation (7), the estimated coefficients for all six of the non-trend explanatory variables exhibit the expected signs, with three being significant at the one percent level, and three being significant at the five percent level. Thus, this 2SPLS estimate reveals that the U.S. Army enlistment rate is an increasing function of both the percent of the population classified as veterans and the civilian unemployment rate, while being a decreasing function of personal income per capita, the percent of the population with a Bachelors degree or more, and the fatality rate. Finally, there is yet more strong evidence on behalf of the hypothesis that the greater the percentage of the civilian population that is without health insurance, the greater the incentive at the margin for civilians to enlist in the U.S. Army. 4. Conclusion This study addresses an essentially heretofore-ignored issue, namely, "Does the unavailability of health insurance act as a marginal incentive for persons to enlist in the U.S. Army?" Within a cost-benefit framework, the present study provides insight into this issue. The empirical analysis includes a variety of control variables and takes the form of a state-level panel data study for the years 2003 through 2007, the most recent years to date for which all of the variables in the model are available and dependable. The six PLS and one 2SPLS results demonstrate, among other things, that the greater the percentage of the civilian population without health insurance, the greater the rate of enlistment in the U.S. Army. One logical implication of this finding would be that if universal health care were implemented across the U.S. as a whole, as would be the case under HR 3200 and the variations thereof being considered by Congress, other things held constant, it would have a deleterious impact on the U.S. army enlistment rate and, presumably, on enlistment in all branches of the military. To the extent that this conclusion holds, additional incentives to increase enlistment would be necessitated in order to maintain the desired/required levels of military personnel.

That the Anglo-American countries do less well on many of these welfare state measures than their European counterparts, with the United States standing out as the extreme outlier, is well-known. But Kenworthy persuasively argues that there are no plausible reasons, of either economic necessity or existing institutional design, that would prevent any country – including the United States – from eventually getting to the same place as Scandinavian social democracies. What blocks such a development 13 628 Theory and Society (2023) 52:625–639 is politics, not economic or fnancial necessity. But even here, Kenworthy is optimistic in a novel way. In the second half of the book, focused on the United States, Kenworthy estimates that devoting an additional 10% of GDP to social programs would be required to bring the U.S. up to Scandinavian levels. The vast increase in income security this would provide could be funded, as all European countries do, with a range of taxes including a value-added tax on consumption and other under-taxed forms of income and wealth (and perhaps, he might have added, a signifcant reduction in the exceptionally high levels of military and counterintelligence expenditures unique to the U.S., which spends 2–3 times as much of its GDP on the military as any European country). Middle class households would pay more in taxes than they do at present – Kenworthy correctly notes the unpleasant fact that although it is very popular right now, new taxes on the rich will not generate nearly enough revenue – but they would also receive far more security and roads to opportunity for themselves and their children then they presently do (as Democratic Party politicians continually struggle to convince voters).

U.S. Army recruiting officials are dusting off a 19-year-old program designed to guarantee young people help finding a job in the civilian world if they sign up for a term of service. Maj. Gen. Frank Muth, commander of Army Recruiting Command, said recently that he was about to sign a deal with Bell to bring the major military helicopter manufacturer into the Partnership for Youth Success (PaYS) program. The effort, launched in 2000, has agreements with about 900 companies to guarantee soldiers job interviews when they exit the service. "I am a big advocate of it, and I have been pushing it hard," he said at a recent Association of the United States Army event. When young people enlist in the Army, they can have PaYS assistance in their contract, Muth said. "It's a drop-down menu; you click on the company that you want to put into your contract and, when you are out of the Army in the next two, three, four, five or 20 years, you are guaranteed two interviews," he explained. "It is a powerful tool to have to be able to walk in after four years of being an [AH-64] Apache helicopter hydraulics specialist, to be able to go to Bell and say, 'Could I apply for a job.'" The defense industry, in particular, is looking to bring in younger people as many in its workforce near retirement age, Muth said. "The companies love this because what we give them is soft skills and, in many cases, hard skills -- this whole thing about maybe showing up to work on time or maybe coming back to work after lunch," he said. "Companies fight for this stuff all the time -- for the right attitude, wanting to win, being part of a team, communicating -- all of those things we provide, we give them." Army recruiters have started placing a greater emphasis on making sure that Generation Z is aware of the wide range of skills it can offer young people. On Veterans Day, the Army launched its new marketing campaign, "What's Your Warrior," which is intended to show young people that the service has many jobs besides infantry and other combat-arms specialties. The first chapter of the new campaign focuses on Army jobs in science and medicine; signal; cyber; and air and space specialties. The approach is a shift from last year's "Warriors Wanted" campaign, which featured soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment and other combat units training for war.

While those problems are not insurmountable, proponents of job guarantees neglect the scale of this political-economic problem. FDR governed like a monarch, and thanks to a series of anti-corruption measures, the WPA was much more successful than it might have been. And yet even his job guarantee program was so beset by patronage and waste that it gave birth to the term “boondoggle.” Now imagine a job guarantee with the quality of governance under the current administration: One recession, and we’d have a permanent army of Border Patrol agents. If that sounds far fetched, don’t forget that the WPA was used to construct military facilities in America’s buildup to entering WWII, and was ultimately wound down to push public workers into military service.

But even breaking down the numbers further, a jobs guarantee could look a lot like the military in execution: an expense we deem necessary and that doesn't require some sort of elaborate pay-for when it needs expansion.

Breaking it down

The closest thing to a job guarantee that the U.S. has had in recent memory is the U.S. military, which provides a decent standard of living, debt-free higher education, health care, and decent benefits — provided you’re willing to risk your life for it. That wasn’t so different than in the post-war era, when so-called military Keynesianism provided GIs with the kinds of amenities usually associated with social democracies. As Stein points out, though, Dixiecrat politicians worked assiduously to ensure that the welfare state of that era — robust compared to what we have now — never fully extended to communities of color.

The Military is the Only Major Federal Jobs Program in the U.S. Understanding that climate disruption is an outcome of our broken economic system, climate threats cannot be separated from other forms of insecurity that people experience in their daily lives. Vast economic insecurity and inequality are outcomes of the financially extractive, fossil-fueled economy. The U.S. military has long capitalized on economic precarity, recruiting poor people who lack other options and middle-class populations faced with significant debt and instability. As a matter of practicality, the prevalence of militarized jobs in communities remains a key political blockade to reducing military funding. As such, solutions to the climate crisis must also address the absence of an adequate number of well-paying jobs, poverty, inequality, and other prevalent socioeconomic concerns of our time. At the same time, we must convert a major share of U.S. manufacturing and engineering from building weapons of war to building a 100% clean energy economy by 2030. While official estimates are known to be too low, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about six million people as unemployed and actively seeking work in 2019—a figure now rendered obsolete by the coronavirus crisis, but indicative of our economy under “good” circumstances.96 This figure does not include all working age people who are unemployed and more comprehensive methods of calculating unemployment often double the standard unemployment rate. Even in the best of times, unemployment rates also vary drastically by geography, race, and age; rural workers, Black workers, Latinx workers, and young people all have higher than average rates of unemployment. In normal times, forty percent of the U.S. workforce is employed in insecure positions, such as temporary, part-time, and “on-call” workers, contractors, and the self-employed. 97 While employment statistics can help illustrate the economic crisis, they can also minimize the lived-realities for the tens of millions of people living in poverty in the United States. In the richest country in the world, even prior to the coronavirus pandemic and its associated economic implosion, there were 140 million poor and low-wealth people. That’s over 43% of the population of the United States. Low pay, job scarcity or inaccessibility, and attacks on unionization work together to keep people in poverty. Do We Have a Poverty Draft in the United States? Mandatory military service ended in 1973, and by the 1980s the term “poverty draft” gained prominence as a term used to describe “the belief that the enlisted ranks of the military were made up of young people with limited economic opportunities.”98 In the context of vast economic precarity in the United States, military service often functions as a “draft-like system” that attracts low-income and other marginalized groups into enlisting because of a lack of other job, income, and educational opportunities available in their communities. Half of all young people who join the military do so as a means to pay for future education.99 Military recruiters have historically recruited among middle and lower classes. Reporting by the Seattle Times in 2005 found, for example, that nearly half of new recruits came “from lower-middle-class to poor households.”100 Native Americans, who have the highest poverty rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States, also serve in the country’s armed forces at the highest rate of any ethnic group in the country.101 Despite such vast economic insecurity, the military is the only major federal jobs program in the United States. Over 1,300,000 Americans are on active military duty and over 800,000 more are in the military reserves. Another 1,600,000 Americans work for companies contracted by the U.S. military not only to supply weapons of war, but also the goods and services that support military operations. 102 The Department of Defense calls itself America’s largest employer - larger than Walmart, even.103 Since the military industrial complex is spread across the United States, some members of congress justify military spending by the jobs it provides their states or districts. War spending is often perceived as an effective way to increase employment, but there are far better ways besides a massive military jobs program to employ Americans.

Yet there were some mixed messages in the May figures. Notably, the unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent, from a five-decade low of 3.4 percent in April. It’s the highest unemployment rate since October. (The government compiles the unemployment data using a different survey than the one used to calculate job gains, and the two surveys sometimes conflict.)

Is the labor market as strong as the gain of 339,000 jobs suggests? Probably not. In May, employers added the most jobs since January. So the overall picture is an encouraging one. Yet there are signs that hiring is cooling from the super-heated levels of the past two years.