QUESTION: recruitment goal numbers

Counterrecruiter.net speculates that the military is deliberately lowering its recruiting goals in order to avoid continuing shortfalls (i.e., we made our goal even though we lowered it)

http://rncwatch.typepad.com/counterrecruiter/2005/06/is_the_army_dis.html

Is there any way to get the recruitment goal numbers from previous months in previous years, (e.g., to allow comparison between goals in June 2003, June 2004, and June 2005)?

It seems like these numbers must be out there, but the DoD website is (surprise!) impossible to get information from.

ANSWER: recruitment goal numbers

I didn't find reports from June 2003, 2004, and 2005 for easy comparison or that exactly support what you're after. Finding those numbers for each specific force (i.e. Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy, the Reserves for each.) might be more doable by searching the news releases on the DoD site. Another problem is that it seems that they work by fiscal, rather than calendar, year, so there won't be any 2005 figures.

Here's a nice chart from http://www.dod.mil/comptroller/par/fy2004/06-01_Detailed_Performance.pdf, page 19, accessed July 2, 2005.

I've retyped this chart from http://www.asafm.army.mil/fo/fod/cfo/afr/currentyr/two.pdf, page 10, accessed July 2, 2005.

Table 1: Recruiting 2002 Actual 2003 Actual 2004 Goal 2004 Actual
Active Army 79,585 74,132 77,000 77,587
Army Reserve 41,697 27,365 32,275 32,699
Army National Guard 63,251 84,202 56,002 49,210



The info from this retyped chart, doesn't entirely match http://www.dod.mil/comptroller/par/fy2004/06-01_Detailed_Performance.pdf, page 31, accessed July 2, 2005, but that may be because it's from the 3rd quarter.

Enlisted Recruiting: FY 2004 Performance Through 3rd Quarter
Army, Active 55,607 target 56,165 achieved
Navy, Active 25,729 target 25,723 achieved
Air Force, Active 26,790 target 27,082 achieved
Marine Corps, Active 19,761 target 19,930 achieved


I found this graphic from the CQ Homeland Security database http://homeland.cq.com.mizuna.cc.columbia.edu:2048
/graphics/weekly/2003/08/02/wr20030802-31troops-map.pdf
(subscription database). "Where is the Army Today?" CQ Weekly, August 2, 2003. 1980.

Another adorable graphic from http://www.defenselink.mil/execsec/adr2003/pdf_files/04_Force_Management.pdf, accessed July 2, 2005, page 10.

I searched dod.mil, defenselink.mil, Jane's Online Research, CQ Homeland Security, and ProQuest. (The last three are subscription databases available via various public and acadmic libraries.) Search strategies included:


Collected links:



A couple of articles found in ProQuest:

I'm not sure this entirely answers your question, but it's a start. Please write again for clarification or additional research.

Jenna radrefjenna at yahoo