About 16,000 recruits who did not initially meet the Army’s requirements for enlistment were able to go through the Future Soldier Preparatory Course, essentially three months of extra training to meet requirements before boot camp.

As a result of the program, the Army surpassed its stated goal of 55,000 accessions by 300. There are also 11,000 soldiers in the delayed entry program, which allows people to join the Army and delay basic training.

The total for the delayed entry program is more than double the goal, according to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, who said it “will allow our recruiting efforts for next year to start strong right out of the gate.”

The Army was suffering from a recruitment shortfall, having missed a stated goal of 65,000 recruits in fiscal 2023 by about 11,000 soldiers. The previous year, it missed a goal of 60,000 by about 15,000.

Since the inception of the Future Soldier Preparatory Course program about two years ago, more than 28,000 recruits from all components have graduated from it, representing a higher than 90% graduation rate, Brig. Gen. Jennifer Walkawicz of the Army Training and Doctrine Command told reporters.

Wormuth faced criticism from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) during a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year, in which he questioned whether the Army was at the time only on pace to meet its recruitment goal because it had been lowered compared to previous years.

“It’s improving because you’re throwing a dart at the wall and then drawing the bullseye around it,” he said during the April hearing. “You don’t think that is a little suspicious, that you’re simply trying to avoid negative headlines once again for your failure to meet basic recruiting goals?”

“I’m not focused on headlines,” Wormuth said. “What I’m doing is doing everything possible to help the Army improve its recruiting, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The average enlistment age is rising and now sits at 22 years and four months old, Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis, commander of Army Recruiting Command, told reporters.

He said the rising average enlistment age demonstrates there is a market for recruiting slightly older people but also that the older crowd would not be incentivized to enlist by the same things.

“That enlistment age only tells us, ‘Hey, there’s another market that we’re not really fully in.’ We’re in the high school market. That is growing, but we really want this labor market to really grow for those who are older,” he said. “If we understand, you know, for a high schooler, of course, you have the GI Bill, you know, we have for college grads, college loan repayment, but now what is it when we look at that labor market?”

The Army has also recently begun working with Deloitte to use artificial intelligence to help identify recruits.

“Instead of what we’ve been doing in the past is really taking a high school list and cold-calling, you know, 200 or 300 high school seniors,” Davis added. “That is what we have to get away from. We have to expand. And from an innovation perspective, that’s been going on for about two months, and there’s a lot of wonderful things that are happening.”

Military leaders across the services attributed poor recruiting numbers in recent years to a variety of factors, including a growing percentage of eligible people by age but who failed to meet the service’s requirements, a growing unfamiliarity between civilians and the military, and the pandemic, which shut down its ability to recruit from its primary targets, such as high schools.