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Harvey Defends Recruiting Effort
10/03/2005
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| Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey speaks at the opening ceremony of the Association of the United States Army's Annual Meeting. |
The active Army brought in slightly more than 73,000 recruits in 2005, Army Secretary Francis Harvey said Tuesday, a figure almost 7,000 short of its goal for the year.
Acknowledging an ongoing recruiting problem, Harvey said that the service had good momentum as its recruiting year closed.
“We are short of where we need to be to grow the Army,” Harvey told reporters at the Association of the United States Army’s Annual Meeting. “Am I concerned? I am concerned. Is this a crisis? No, this is not a crisis.”
He added: “This is something that I worry about every day, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’ve got positive momentum, that the problem is solved – I don’t know yet. But rest assured we’ve got positive action.”
Harvey also defended the National Guard’s response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina and how the military dealt with armoring its Iraqi-deployed vehicles.
The Associated Press reported last week that the Army had experienced its greatest recruiting shortfall this year since 1979. The Army recruited between 73,200 and 73,300 soldiers goal for the recruiting year, which ended with the close of September. The year’s goal was 80,000.
He also said that the Delayed Entry Program will be down again going into the 2006 recruiting year, with about 12 percent of next year’s goal signed up, as opposed to 17 or 18 percent for 2005.
He cited three factors contributing to the ongoing recruiting situation. “One of which is the economy, one is Iraq and one, which is related, is that parents are not willing to let their sons and daughters join the all volunteer army.”
Harvey cast the figures in the best possible light, noting that the Army hit its recruiting goals in the first and last four months of the year.
“Let’s put this whole thing in perspective,” he said. “Over the last 10 years, the average recruiting number is about 74,200. … Our final numbers are about 73,200 to 73,300. So we’re about a thousand, or one percent, off our average recruits over the last 10 years … We have a good momentum going right now.”
He cited a number of efforts the Army has made to step up its recruiting, including proposing a $2,500 finders fee for any soldier who identifies a potential recruit who actually joins the service, doubling the top-level enlistment bonuses for certain specialties, and a home mortgage program that would give $25,000 for a home down payment for soldiers who serve four years.
Harvey denied the notion that the Army had lowered its recruiting standards to combat the problem. He said that when the service lowered the proportion of “Category I to III-A” recruits, it brought in from 67 percent to 60 percent and increased the number of “Category IV” recruits from 2 percent to 4, it was not a change of standards, because the 60 percent and four percent figures are in line with what the Defense Department sets for the other armed services. The 67 percent figure that the Army had used was an “artificial system,” he argued.
“They really weren’t standards, they really were just guidelines,” he said. “We are not changing standards; we are just going to abide by the longstanding DoD standards when it comes to quality.”
Addressing the issue of Army National Guard response to Hurricane Katrina, Harvey said “I was satisfied with the fact that in a little over a week, we got 40,000 National Guard, which again proves that for the homeland security initiative we are properly organized.”
He also denied that there were any problems with the Army’s effort to ensure that vehicles deployed to Iraq were properly armored. “I really don’t think the system fell down,” he said, pointing out that it took only 15 months for the number of up-armored vehicles in Iraq to go from 300 to 30,000.
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