Testimony presented before the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation on May 11, 2023.
Beth Asch, Senior Economist, RAND Corporation
Each year the armed services set accession missions, which are their goals for how many people they want to recruit that year. The services rarely missed their accession missions, but in fiscal year 2022, Coast Guard missed its accession mission by over 25%. The other services struggled as well. The Army not only missed its accession mission, it did so by a historic amount. Unfortunately, three of the four services, now I hear fourth service, are on track to fail to meet their accession missions for 2023.
In terms of what the Coast Guard can do, it needs in the short term to focus on recruiting, increasing recruiters and advertising in an effective way. The services should offer more enlistment bonuses and increase the dollar amount of those bonuses. Research shows that bonuses are effective in expanding the market and have a particularly large effect on channeling recruits into hard to fill specialties and they can be turned on quickly.
For the long term, the armed services should focus on gaining a better understanding of relevant factors that are changing and identifying how to respond to them. These include, first, gaining a better understanding of factors explaining the decline in the labor force, participation of young people and what that means for recruiting. Second, understanding why public trust in the military has declined and how factors explaining that decline affect recruiting, if at all, controlling for other factors. Third, identifying how to optimize marketing and advertising in the age of social media. Developing an effective set of messages that connect with the target audience and consider the use of nontraditional media such as streaming services to implement that marketing strategy. And fourth, open the aperture of eligibility for enlistment by validating current enlistment standards and identifying whether such standards are out of date or screening out applicants who would otherwise be successful in the armed services.
As more data becomes available, the services should be doing rigorous analysis to identify the underlying causes of the crisis, policy effects and where to target their future recruiting efforts.
