With todays recruiting challenges, has the All Volunteer Army Force run its course?

Running head : Military recruitment

Student 's name

Name of College

Sep 7 , 2008

INTRODUCTION

Prestige and pride were the of the day in United State military camps . In the last many years , many people always turned up for recruitments into military . This large stream made it easy for the serving officers to recruit many people . The ease of recruitment further reduced and resulted into reduced costs on many services like advertisements . This has however changed . Very few people turn up for recruitment in the recent past . This is as

reported by many news agencies and the department of defense . Moving into the 21st century new and better strategies have to be embraced so as to influence the youth into volunteering their cervices into the military . Many factors resulting into reduction in military enrolment are described in this . Their impact to the military as a whole are also explained

CHALLENGES ON MILITARY RECRUITMANT

Many people have resorted into activities that give them fast economic gains . The economic standards of this generation is slightly stable and higher that the days gone by . This has influenced many people to engage in activities which give them money very fast . Their occupation therefore gives them no time to prepare and go for military recruitment

Education is another factor that contributes to the low turn out in military recruitments . The laws stipulated that only high school diplomas should be absorbed into the system . This is the right education level to successfully participate in the training . Many people who respond to the recruitment however have lower qualifications compared to this . This has proved to be a real challenge to the recruiting officers and has worked towards reducing the number of people who are finally picked to military work . The recruitment has also fallen greatly because many people fail in the compulsory armed forces qualification tests (AFQT . Past statistics reveal that many people up to a sample of 67 always passed this test by obtaining at least 50 (Jeremi ,

. 2005 . The number of recruits has however fallen to far below 50 . This is a worrying finding and has resulted into the fall of the number of recruits selected . AFQT is an exam which tests on comprehension arithmetic , reasoning , word knowledge , paragraphing and mathematics . The most recent data indicates that only 60 .8 of the recruits passed this test in 2005 . The percentage of high quality candidates has continued to fall with time and only 44 .6 of the candidates are reported to have passed in 2007

The bureaucracy is another factor contributing to the reduction of the recruits in the military . A lot of complexities are reported to exist in the administration ranks of the military . Processing information takes a lot of time and energy . This is a discouraging fact to the potential applicants of military . Processing of their applications and letters is feared to tale a bit long and even face rejection . Recruitment drives are always carried out during specific seasons . This happens many...