Selling America: The Army’s fight to find recruits in a mistrustful, divided nation

TOMS RIVER, N.J. — Sgt. 1st Class Dane Beaston had endured the stress, frustration and disappointment of one of the worst recruiting slumps in the half-century history of the U.S. military’s all-volunteer force.

Now he was trying to do his part to end it. It was early June and his central New Jersey recruiting station was on the hook to find seven recruits who were willing to join the Army — the station’s highest monthly quota of the year. Beaston scanned a color-coded list of about 30 prospects on the station’s radar.

“That’s not nearly enough,” the 31-year-old sergeant told his recruiters as the month began.

If Beaston and his team didn’t deliver, he knew his Army career was in jeopardy. “You can do all the work 100 percent of the time,” he said. “But if you don’t find the right person, you’re out of luck.”

The unrelenting pressure Beaston and his six-person team were feeling reflected the high stakes for the military and the country. Each of the services — except for the Marine Corps — missed its 2023 recruiting goal. The Army, which had come up short two years in a row, was aiming to bring in 55,000 recruits in 2024 — about 10,000 fewer than last year’s missed goal. The new target wasn’t determined by the threats facing the country, the amount of money that Congress was willing to spend or the number of tanks and helicopters the Pentagon could field.

Rather it was a reflection of how many people senior Army officials believed the service could find. Beaston and his team had put nearly 40 people in the Army since the beginning of the fiscal year in October — a solid start. But he knew how hard it was to find qualified and willing candidates in today’s America.

Across the country, recruiters were struggling to find soldiers among a shrinking pool of qualified young people. Only about 23% of all Americans between the ages of 17-24 meet the Army’s physical, moral and educational standards.

Beaston and his recruiters were also searching for prospects at a time when Americans’ confidence in their country was crumbling. He and his team weren’t just pitching a job. They were asking young people to put their trust in their country’s leaders, who could send them to war, and in their fellow citizens, who would fight alongside them. They were selling America.

Whenever they left the office, people would thank them for their service. But it was getting harder and harder in an increasingly polarized and pessimistic country to find young people who wanted to swear an oath to the Constitution and serve.

Only about 9% of young people say they are likely to consider military service, down from 16% in the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to Defense Department surveys. Pentagon officials blamed some of the recent drop on the hot job market. But they also knew that the low unemployment rate couldn’t explain the totality of the problem.

Trust in all American institutions — the Supreme Court, Congress, police, public schools — has in recent years plummeted, according to Gallup. The armed forces, though still relatively popular, have not been immune: In 2023, about 60% of Americans said they had a “great deal” of confidence in the military, the lowest percentage since 1997, Gallup found.

“There’s a relationship between that propensity number and a lot of what you see in surveys about trust in institutions, pride in country and levels of patriotism,” said Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth in an interview.

Today, U.S. soldiers are spread across the globe, training Ukrainian troops to fight the Russians and working alongside allies to deter China, North Korea and Iran.

“If we get too small, our ability to do those things is at risk,” she said. The success or failure of those missions and America’s future as a superpower began with soldiers like Beaston.

There were 27 days left in the month. To meet the station’s quota of seven recruits, everything would have to go right for Beaston and his team. And he knew from experience that rarely happened.

‘Ever thought about joining the Army?’

Beaston and his recruiters gathered around a table at the center of the station to review their best active prospects.

There was an 18-year-old who had dropped out of high school and was taking his GED, or General Educational Development test, later in the week. If he passed the exam and cleared his physical, he could enlist in June.

Several other possible recruits were waiting on waivers for medical conditions, such as asthma or ADHD, a slow and bureaucratic process that could take weeks or in some cases months.

One promising candidate had recently smoked marijuana, which is legal in New Jersey but disqualifying for the U.S. military, and was waiting for the THC to clear his system.

Not one of the prospects was a sure thing.

After their morning meeting, Beaston and Staff Sgt. Ken Dziminski headed out from their station, which sits in a strip mall next to a bagel shop and a nail salon. They were carrying a stack of flyers offering “up to $27,100″ a year in tuition assistance.

Their region along the Jersey Shore is mostly middle class and white, though the fastest growth of late has been among Latino immigrants working in construction and tourism. The two soldiers navigated the suburban sprawl, tacking the flyers on bulletin boards in the back of stores — a Wawa, a Lowe’s hardware, a smoothie shop.

At each stop they scouted the aisles for prospects: 20-somethings stuck in dead-end retail jobs, high school athletes, teens decked out in patriotic gear.

“Ever thought about joining the Army?” Beaston would ask.

A 30-second interaction with a stranger in a smoothie shop wasn’t likely to produce an enlistment contract. But Beaston reasoned that the conversations were a way of planting a seed with a population that typically gave almost no thought to military service.

The push that made Beaston want to be a soldier had come on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His school closed early that morning and Beaston, who was in the fourth grade, spent the rest of the day at home with his mom in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, about 30 miles south of Boston, watching video of the burning towers on the news. “In my head, I was like, ‘I am going to join,’” he recalled. “I didn’t know which branch. I just knew I was going to join.”

He shipped off to basic training at age 17 and did a one-year tour in Afghanistan repairing Blackhawk helicopters. Now, more than a dozen years later, he was married with two preschool-age children and a plan to stay until he hit 20 years of service and could retire. The word “loyalty” was tattooed in large red and blue letters on his forearm. He’d picked it out on a whim when a pretty girl from basic training had asked him to go with her to a tattoo parlor. The longer Beaston stayed in the Army, the more the tattoo seemed to fit him.

“It’s who I am,” he said. “That’s me to a T.”

He and Dziminski finished posting the flyers. In the car, the two recruiters — both Afghanistan veterans — began talking about the ways the country had changed since they had joined the Army. Almost all of today’s prospects were born after the 9/11 attacks. Most viewed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a distant historical event or a costly mistake.

The biggest change, though, was political. The Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were bombarding the country with warnings that the most dangerous threats to America came from within its borders; that their opponent, if elected, would plunge the nation into autocracy.

Beaston and Dziminski agreed that they never wanted the country to go through another terrorist attack. “But I wish we all could come together the way we did on September 12th,” Dziminski said as they approached the Toms River station, one of about 1,500 scattered across the country.

Each Army recruiter is expected to produce at least one enlistment contract a month. Beaston’s job, as the Toms River station commander, was to make sure the station hit its overall goal.

Shortly before the station shut down for the day, his company commander, who oversees seven New Jersey recruiting stations, dropped by the office. June was shaping up as a lean month for the entire company.

“What are you projecting for the month?” Capt. Ben Kottraba asked.

The station wasn’t likely to meet its seven-person goal, Beaston replied, but five seemed possible. The commander grabbed his hat and headed toward the door.

“Is there anything else you need from me?” Beaston asked.

“Contracts,” the commander replied.

Lost in translation

Early the next morning, one of Beaston’s recruiters, Staff Sgt. Jesus Ramos, greeted one of those potential contracts at the door of the Toms River recruiting station.

He was a skinny, soft-spoken 19-year-old with thick black hair named Jeremy Calvo. Calvo, who was born in the United States but raised in Mexico, spoke limited English. He was about to take the military’s entrance exam — the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or ASVAB — for the third time. A month earlier, he had scored in the 15th percentile, one point shy of the minimum he needed to be eligible for the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, an intensive program that the Army launched in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic and school shutdowns accelerated long-standing, negative trends eating away at the pool of eligible recruits. The number of young people taking prohibited medications for depression or ADHD surged. Obesity rates rose, and scores on the ASVAB fell.

The new course is a nod to post-pandemic reality. Some enlistees, who spend three weeks at military bases in South Carolina and Georgia, receive tutoring in math and reading comprehension to help them raise their ASVAB scores. Others get physical training to drop body fat. So far this year about 23,000 recruits have participated in the program, which was being hailed in the Pentagon as a success.

Ramos could see that Calvo was nervous about the test, so the 38-year-old sergeant draped an arm over the young prospect’s shoulder. “Tranquilo,” Ramos told him. “You know how it is, so you’ll be good this time.”

Hispanics account for about 10% of the population in Ocean County, which makes up the bulk of the Toms River recruiting area, up from about 5% in 2000. They are an even larger percentage of the region’s working class. The Army had begun seeking out Spanish-speaking sergeants, such as Ramos, and assigning them to recruiting duty in regions with large or rapidly growing Latino populations. But senior Army officials said that they still didn’t have enough bilingual recruiters.

At Toms River, Ramos’s biggest problem was finding native Spanish speakers with the English skills to pass the ASVAB exam, an area where Ramos had some personal experience.

The first time Ramos, who grew up in Puerto Rico, took the test he scored in the sixth percentile. Eventually, he hit the minimum that he needed to enlist, but his English was still shaky. So the commander at his first duty station, in Upstate New York, forced him to practice by answering phones and greeting guests in the unit’s reception area. Slowly, he improved.

Many of the prospects Ramos encountered in Toms River worked in restaurants where the kitchen staff only spoke Spanish, worshiped at Spanish-language churches and hung out with Spanish-speaking friends.

Ramos urged them to change the language on their phones from Spanish to English and turn on English subtitles when they were watching television. But often it wasn’t enough; what they really needed were English lessons, which the Army has been reluctant to provide on a widespread basis. Some senior Pentagon officials said it wasn’t the military’s place to offer English classes. Others equated recruits’ lack of fluency with a lack of will.

Motivation didn’t seem to be an issue for Calvo, who reckoned that enlisting in the Army wasn’t going to be more dangerous than living in Mexico, where cartels and corrupt officials preyed on ordinary people.

“Have you been studying?” Beaston asked.

“Yeah,” Calvo answered.

“A lot or a little?” Beaston pressed.

“More,” Calvo replied uncertainly.

Several hours later, Beaston checked Calvo’s results online. He had come up short. Because it was his third failure, Calvo would have to wait at least six months before he could try again.

Ramos broke the news to him at the station. For now, Calvo’s plan was to go back to his job working double shifts filling bottles with pills at a pharmaceutical factory. “I don’t know if I’ll come back,” he said in Spanish.

He headed for his car in the sweltering parking lot. Inside the recruiting station, Ramos terminated him from the station’s list of active prospects.

Joining the team

Over the next couple of weeks, everything that could possibly go wrong for the Toms River station did. Beaston and his recruiters lost prospects to last-minute cases of cold feet, low ASVAB exam scores and time-consuming medical waivers.

The Army had surged medical personnel to speed up the waiver process, which often requires recruits with disqualifying conditions to get approval from Army doctors and sign-off from senior commanders. And it had successfully petitioned the Pentagon to reduce the time that candidates needed to be off drugs for ADHD and depression before they required a doctor’s consult and a waiver. The changes had helped, but recruiters across the country complained that the process was still too slow.

With 10 days left in June, the Toms River station still hadn’t put anyone in the Army. First Sgt. Juan Valencia, the company’s senior enlisted soldier, called Beaston to check in and prod him to push his team harder.

“It’s been a series of unfortunate events,” Beaston explained. “It’s not for lack of trying.”

The line went silent for a second. “Trying is subjective,” Valencia told him. Beaston’s job was to produce contracts.

Twenty months earlier, when Beaston took over Toms River, it was mired in a devastating slump. In fiscal 2022, it made only 23% of its active-duty Army recruiting goal. Morale in the station was “miserable,” Beaston said.

The new station commander had grabbed a whiteboard and written “HOW TO FAIL” across the top, then listed 40 mistakes that he had made or seen others make as recruiters: “Be arrogant. Blame circumstances. Never ask for help. Never train. Expect others to save you.”

Under Beaston’s leadership, the Toms River station rapidly improved. Last year it hit 44% of its active duty goal and was doing even better this year. The whiteboard, though, still sat on the floor by Beaston’s desk.

Sgt. First Class Bryan Glass, a field artilleryman doing a three-year stint as a recruiter, was working with the Toms River station’s best prospect for the month. Glass had found Seven Wattley via a GED tutoring program run by the New Jersey National Guard.

The 18-year-old had cleared his medical screening and passed the ASVAB. The only problem was Wattley’s mother, who didn’t want her son to enlist and was staunchly opposed to his joining the infantry, his top job choice. Glass, 31, tried to bring her around by talking about all the Army had done for him. He had lost his father to cancer at age 13. His mother struggled with addiction, and he spent his teenage years in the foster care system in rural Maryland. “I didn’t want to be someone else’s problem,” he said of his decision to join the Army.

Now he was a married father of two with a house, a new boat and two RVs that he rented out on weekends. Glass’s story was typical of the draft-era Army and the early years of the all-volunteer force when military service was a powerful engine of upward mobility.

With the end of the Cold War, the Army got smaller, more selective and isolated from the rest of the country. “We’re closing in on ourselves,” Wormuth, the Army secretary, worried. Today, 81% of Army recruits come from military families. In Pentagon surveys, young Americans and their parents said they knew little about the armed forces.

Recruiters, like Glass, were finding it harder than ever to break through. “Does anyone know anybody who’s interested in serving their country?” he recalled writing on his neighborhood’s community page in late June.

“Not with the state of this country,” Glass recalled one person replying. A second commenter chimed in with a similar sentiment before the page’s administrator warned that the forum didn’t allow political conversations.

“No politics here,” Glass replied. “I’m just looking for people interested in a great job with unmatchable benefits.” A few minutes later, the administrator deleted the entire exchange.

On June 24, Glass picked up Wattley at his father’s townhouse and drove him to a nearby military base where Wattley was going to pick an Army job and, if all went as planned, enlist. He didn’t own a phone, so Wattley borrowed Glass’s and called his mom from the base.

“Hello, we’re at the place signing papers,” he told her.

“Signing what?!” she exclaimed.

Wattley chose a basic training ship date in August. Then it was time to select a job. His mom begged him to pick “something with computers,” but Wattley told her that he wanted to stick to his original plan and go infantry.

“It’ll literally be three years of hiding from people, getting shot at and shooting,” she replied. “I don’t know why you want to do this.” She took a deep breath. “But I’m going to respect it,” she said.

Wattley hung up the phone.

“You ready?” Glass asked. “You wanna do it?”

Wattley walked to the front of the room, raised his right hand and swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The Toms River station had finally secured its first enlistment contract of the month. There were six days left in June and six more contracts needed to meet the monthly quota.

Wattley and Glass walked out of the building and into the warm sun. A few months earlier, Wattley was a high school dropout who spent most of his waking hours playing video games and working at McDonald’s, where he once had to scrub feces off the bathroom walls. That was his low point. Now he felt like he was finally on his way to doing something big and important.

“This is like so surreal,” Wattley said as he climbed into Glass’s car. Glass handed Wattley his phone, and he dialed his mom.

“I’m officially part of the team,” Wattley told her.

American dreaming

With four days left until the end of the month, the Toms River station kept losing prospects. One of Glass’s recruits opted for college. A second vaped marijuana at a party and had to cancel his Army physical. He probably wouldn’t test clean for 90 days.

The latest round of losses guaranteed that the station would finish June with only one enlistment contract — its worst month of the year. A few hours later, Beaston got some bad news about July. Two of the station’s best remaining prospects — rising high school seniors who planned to enlist via the Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory program — were going to have to wait. The Army was temporarily ratcheting back access to the remedial training program. No one at the station knew precisely why the changes were being made or how long they would last.

Beaston had been hoping a strong July could make up for June’s struggles and get the station back on track. Now he was worried that the slump was going to follow the station deeper into the summer.

“Take a breath. Take a breath,” Beaston said to himself. “It’ll work out.”

He pulled out the station’s color-coded list of prospects and stared at it in silence for nearly a minute, his face resting in his hands. The most solid name on the list was Sebastian Villaorduña, who had gone with Ramos earlier that morning to take his first stab at the ASVAB test. His score was likely to post online at any minute.

“C’mon, Villaorduña,” Beaston pleaded.

The 23-year-old recruit had arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport from Peru last year, reuniting with his mother, who had left him behind a decade ago. At first, she didn’t recognize him. She had come to the United States illegally, via the Texas border, where she was intercepted by immigration officers who stuck her in a cold cell with 50 other migrant women. A couple of weeks later, they moved her to a detention center in Louisiana, where she stayed for another four months.

“The American Dream,” she recalled ruefully. “But we had to put up with it.”

Villaorduña’s stepfather, a U.S. citizen, had sponsored him. Soon he began working at a restaurant on the boardwalk that served Mexican and “classic American-style” fare — burgers, tacos and $14 margaritas — prepared by a kitchen staff that hailed from central and South America. The 12-hour shifts left little time for socializing.

Ramos told Villaorduña about the places he’d visited since joining the Army: the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Yankee Stadium. He had met people from all over the country.

“I never thought I would be able to do these things,” he said.

Villaorduña listened attentively. So many young Americans saw the military as a detour from the life they envisioned for themselves or as something beneath them. For Villaorduña, joining the Army was a pathway to becoming more fully part of a country that offered promise and possibilities beyond his reach in Peru.

Villaorduña’s scores posted around 2:30 p.m. Beaston immediately called Ramos with the news. “What he got?” Ramos asked nervously.

“He did great,” Beaston replied.

Ramos, joyful and relieved, shouted an expletive cheer.

Villaorduña wasn’t going to be able to enlist in June. He still needed to take his Army physical. But if he cleared the medical screening, he’d be able to join in July when the Toms River station was going to be on the hook for six more recruits.

‘They’re out there’

Beaston was determined not to let the Toms River station backslide into the dark days when it almost never made its monthly goal. So he had stayed up late preparing a presentation for his recruiters, who were now sitting around him at a table in the center of the station.

“Someone hit the lights,” he said.

The recruiters turned to face a screen that was playing an excerpt of former president Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, an homage to those who “strive valiantly,” fail often and keep fighting.

“That’s what this job is, right?” Beaston told them. “It’s continuously failing in order to get that one success … that yes.”

Next came a video of a talk from a submarine commander on the importance of taking initiative. Their situation, Beaston said, was similar to that of a submarine crew operating on its own beneath the ocean. Beaston and his recruiters weren’t working on a big military base, surrounded by officers. They were stuck in a central New Jersey strip mall.

In Washington, senior Army officials were working to provide support to stations like Toms River. They rolled out a new ad campaign and were testing artificial intelligence tools that they hope will help recruiters identify the most promising candidates amid tens of thousands of leads.

So far, the initiatives seem to be helping the Army dig out of the hole left by two years of shortfalls. Officials expect to exceed this year’s 55,000 goal by several thousand recruits and set a higher target for 2025, even as they caution that societal forces could continue to shrink their applicant pool. “This isn’t one of those things where you say we kind of have it figured out and we’re good to go,” said Gen. Randy George, the Army’s top officer.

Beaston wanted his recruiters to see beyond the station’s disappointing month and focus on how far they had come. Last fiscal year, the station hit only 43% of its regular Army goal. This year it was already at 72% with three months to go. In June, the station got two more recruiters, part of an eight-month effort to add about 800 recruiters nationwide.

“Next year you all should be crushing it,” Beaston said. “There’s going to be a line outside Toms River recruiting station. I’m telling you. I cannot wait.”

“I wish it was that easy,” Glass replied.

“Nah, man,” Beaston promised, “we’re going to get there.”

Outside, cars zipped past the Toms River station, full of people headed to work or the beach — a typical summer morning at the Jersey Shore. “They’re out there,” Beaston said. “I know they are.”

He and his recruiters just needed to find them.