The Air Force is on track to hit its annual recruitment goal three months early, Chief Master Sgt. Frank Rawls, the chief recruiter for the branch, told Military.com on Tuesday.
Although budget woes caused the Air Force to slightly revise down their recruitment goals for this year, the branch is still projected to meet their target of 29,950 new active-duty airmen by the end of June, three months ahead of schedule, Rawls told Military.com. Other service branches — including the U.S. Army — have also seen an upswing in recruitment after struggling to find new blood as former President Joe Biden’s administration’s left-wing policies dissuaded potential recruits from joining up during his tenure.
Rawls told Military.com that the service is currently “96%” of the way to its recruitment goal.
The Air Force is still projected to surpass its original, more ambitious goal of 32,500 airmen for this fiscal year, but the force lowered the goal to its current level due to constraints from the budget reconciliation process in Congress.
“We suffered a recruiting setback due to the yearlong continuing resolution and subsequent reduction of nearly half a billion dollars in our military personnel account,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said during a June 5 House hearing. “This will result in our inability to fund the recruitment of 3,000 Americans who want to join our Air Force.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pursued a major culture shift at the Pentagon, an initiative he has credited as a key reason for the uptick in recruitment numbers among the armed forces.
The Air Force missed its recruiting targets in 2023 for the first time since the 1990s, according to Military.com. Some outlets, including Military.com, attributed the decline due to the COVID-19 pandemic despite Biden declaring the pandemic over in September 2022.
“We continue to bring in folks that historically would have been shut out of the Air Force and they would have walked right over to the Navy office, or the Army office, or the Marines,” Rawls told Military.com. “So, aligning our policies with the other services continues to pay big dividends for us because this is meeting society where society is.”
The Air Force did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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