Beth Asch is a senior principal economist at RAND. Her areas of study include labor and personnel economics and defense manpower. She has led numerous studies on compensation design in the military and in the federal civil service, on the workforce implications of state and local pension reform, and on military recruiting and personnel supply to the armed forces. Her most recent work includes analysis and redesign of the military pay table, military retirement reform, state and local pension reform, enlistment supply and recruiting resource effectiveness, retention and compensation in the federal civil service, and food insecurity in the armed forces.
EXPERT Q&A — Discussions about the future of war and whether the U.S. is ready for the next conflict often center on the adoption of advanced technology, new hybrid warfare and “gray zone” tactics, and the need to better leverage the power of the private sector. But experts and officials warn that there is a critical, more fundamental component to U.S. military readiness that cannot be forgotten: manpower.
Top officials from each branch of the U.S. military who oversee manpower and personnel testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week about efforts to strengthen and bolster their recruiting efforts. In separate hearings, top commanders warned of the disastrous impacts personnel cuts would have on their missions.
The Cipher Brief turned to Beth Asch, a senior principal economist at RAND, to discuss two areas that she has studied extensively on this front: U.S. military recruitment and retention.
Asch spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can watch the full discussion on The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
The Cipher Brief: How do you gauge how the military writ large is doing when it comes to sheer numbers across the services?
Asch: The services have to have a certain end strength — how many people are going to be there? They can meet that end strength through recruiting people or retaining the people they have. And of course, they do both.
Recruiting is really important to meet their overall strength. Each year they set a recruiting goal on the number of people they want to bring in. What has happened is what people call a recruiting crisis. Usually when crises emerge, they first show up in the Army because the Army is the largest service and has the largest recruiting goal. And sure enough, in 2018, the Army missed its recruiting goal, and then it missed it in 2022, by a lot. And then the problem spread. In 2023, it was the Army, the Navy, the Air Force; it was really just the Marine Corps and the Space Force that met their numbers. So by 2023, it was a pervasive problem across the services.
Nagorski: [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth announced January was the best month the Army had had in years. The Air Force chief of staff has made similar comments. Are these just flash in the pan things? Or is there a real uptick happening?
Asch: In terms of numbers, in 2024, all the services but the Navy met their numbers in terms of recruiting. That was an improvement; and even the Navy, though it missed it, was well on track to making it. So the good news in terms of numbers really was starting to show up in 2024. Now what’s happened in 2025, all of the services are making the mission. And in the case of the Army and the Navy they are well exceeding the numbers.
The Cipher Brief: What accounts for the swing?
Asch: We don’t even know what caused the crisis, so we don’t know what’s fixed it. We have a lot of research over the 50-plus years of the all-volunteer force on the factors that affect recruiting. So of course we have hypotheses, but there’s a lot that has been changing all at once: the civilian economy; the opportunities to go to college for young people; the military pay; the resources brought on to bear for recruiting, like the number of recruiters and how they manage those recruiters; how they select recruiters, how they deploy them across the country, how they train them — it’s a sales force; how do they motivate them, the marketing and advertising. So a lot has happened and we don’t know what exactly the good news is due to.
The Cipher Brief: You’ve studied and written about retention. How have the various services been doing on that front?
Asch: Actually retention is a good news story. Retention has been quite strong for quite some time. For the Army, even going back to 2017, they’ve been exceeding their goals in terms of retention. It’s not just the Army, it’s all the services.
There’s always pockets of problems. Certain communities like aviators, there’s always some retention issues. But overall retention has been quite strong. And that’s a good news story.
The Cipher Brief: Is there something that accounts for those? I would imagine in the midst of two wars and being in a service can be not just a stressful job, but a very dangerous one. Did the end of the Iraq conflict and the war in Afghanistan help with retention?
Asch: A lot of things affect retention. We have information from surveys, and information from factors affecting decisions of people to leave. People join the military for a particular reason. It’s also a family decision, how it’s impacting their spouse and their family.
Not to say there isn’t unhappiness, but people seem generally happy with what they’re doing. And frankly, military compensation and the benefits package has been quite robust. And it’s quite attractive, especially when you’re facing a civilian labor market that’s been quite a tight market. But there’s a lot of uncertainty there as well.
The Cipher Brief: You said recently that the numbers are being filled, but the quality of recruits is a “true readiness issue.” So what’s at play there?
Asch: Even with our good year, 2024, where all the services were pretty much making the mission except for the Navy, which was close, the Navy was off in terms of quality. And not by a little, but by a lot. And now when we look at the quality numbers in 2025, yes, services are exceeding their missions in some case, but the Army and Navy do not appear to be making their quality marks.
What do I mean by quality and why does it matter? There’s actually a very formal definition of quality for recruits. Quality is defined, for a recruit, for an enlisted, as they have a high school diploma and that they score above average on an aptitude test. Why those two? A lot of research has shown that people who get their high school diplomas are people who will complete their enlistment contract and won’t drop out early. So it’s a predictor of attrition. In terms of aptitude, there’s quite a bit of research across the services, although it’s somewhat old, that shows that people who have higher aptitude and score better do better on real life, hands-on military tasks in terms of being trainable, absorbing the training, applying the training, communicating, doing the skills, and in some ways doing the skills efficiently according to tactics, like they’re supposed to. So it matters for productivity.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense sets benchmarks for each service. They have to have at least 90% of the recruits be high school diploma graduates, so nearly all of them have to have a diploma. And 60% have to score above average [on the aptitude test.] The Navy missed that benchmark on the aptitude. They didn’t make the 60%. And now the Navy and the Army are not making it. And quality matters because if we are not bringing in people with the right and adequate aptitude, this is the recipe for errors, mistakes, inefficiency, poor communication. All of the things in the recipe for readiness. So it’s a concern.
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The Cipher Brief: I guess part of the challenge is the higher your aptitude, the more choices you have. Are there tried and true ways you’d suggest that recruiters go about that to get a higher success rate?
Asch: Pay, bonuses, recruiters, advertising, marketing, all of those have shown to expand the market for high quality. But ultimately what really matters is you can expand the marketing, but if you don’t have recruiters targeting their effort towards that market, you can have a bunch of individuals who are interested, but not the recruiters who are out there who are reaping that expanded interest. So it’s very important to make sure that the recruiters are targeting their efforts towards those types of people. Recruiters are in a way like sales people. They’re selling military service. And they are under different incentive plans. They need to have the incentives, to focus on getting those types of kids.
But to your point, these individuals do have better civilian opportunities. We know from surveys that some youth see the military as an interruption of their life. And what we do know is the military is less of an interruption and more of a stepping stone. It provides the training, the opportunities for maturing and so forth to give you the skills to go out into the civilian world and get good jobs and good training. So I think it’s important to convince those individuals that no, you’re not interrupting your life. You’re doing a stepping stone towards the career and the life you want to have.
The Cipher Brief: We know the Defense Secretary himself has talked about restructuring, reorganizing within the Department of Defense. We have Elon Musk and his efficiency teams going all over the place. Is any of that impacting what we’ve been talking about?
Asch: It’s really hard to say. Because of these recruiting issues, in some ways the recruiting commands have kind of gotten ahead of the game here. They have been on overdrive, really revamping their operations to improve what they’re doing. And they have tried a lot of approaches. This is not part of DOGE. It’s just that they saw that we are not successful and we need to figure out how to be successful. So there’s been a tremendous amount of reforms, rethinking, redoing, reallocating, restructuring in the recruiting world to be a more effective force to meet the recruiting goals.
I don’t know how all that’s going to shake out for recruiting. But I do know that a tremendous amount of effort has already gone into rethinking recruiting.
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