Chief Petty Officer Will Cawley is working overtime on the faded blocks of West Baltimore, trying to coax the next generation into the Navy fleet. His chief obstacle is not competition from a robust economy; it's drugs and poor education.
Working from a storefront recruiting station off Pratt Street, Cawley rejects more than half the would-be sailors because of their persistent drug use or inability to pass the military's general-knowledge entrance test.
"What do they learn in school?" asks an exasperated Cawley, a third-generation serviceman from the Eastern Shore. With five days left in October, Cawley was sure he would miss his six-sailor monthly quota.
"I've talked to 42 people, and we have two in the Navy," he says.
What Cawley, 35, is experiencing is not simply the pathologies of the crumbling inner city. Navy and Army recruiters across the nation say these same problems are crossing racial and regional lines, extending into leafy suburbs and rural outposts. Recruiting shortages, top officers say, are dulling America's military edge.
What's more, past and present Pentagon officials say, the Navy has bungled its recruiting efforts over the past year by failing to send more recruiters into the field or to pump enough advertising dollars into its budget. Those missteps contributed to the Navy having missed its recruiting goal for the first time since 1973, when the all-volunteer military was created.
The Navy fell 7,000 sailors below its recruiting goal last year. As a result, some ships are not fully staffed. The Navy's recruitment problem is the worst in the military, but the other services are in trouble as well.
For the fourth time in 25 years, the Army missed its recruitment goal last year -- by about 800 soldiers, officials say. The two smallest services -- the Marine Corps and the Air Force -- are meeting their personnel needs, but leaders say that attracting recruits is becoming harder for them as well.
Military leaders tell Congress that the lure of fat paychecks and benefits from a thriving job market are to blame for recruiting shortfalls. The military is now spending tens of millions of dollars more on advertising and hiring hundreds of additional recruiters to attract America's youth.
"We definitely have to talk to and screen many more people than we did years ago," says Rear Adm. Barbara E. McGann, commander of Navy recruiting. "Those most qualified in the marketplace have many options."
Meanwhile, polls show a declining teen interest in enlisting, McGann and other top recruiters say. There are also fewer military-veteran role models at home or in the schools to encourage a career in uniform.
In good and bad times
But interviews with nearly two dozen recruiters around the nation suggest that the economy, bungled planning and declining interest are only a partial answer to the recruiting crisis. Drugs and poor test scores are increasingly eroding the applicant pool, worming their way through good and bad economic times.
As a result, recruiters are working longer hours, sometimes six or seven days a week, to attract high school and junior college students. And they are going into middle schools and junior high schools in greater numbers, preaching an anti-drug message and urging students not to drop out.
"We let them know there are things you can't do," says Sgt. 1st Class Donnel Daniels, an eight-year veteran of Army recruiting in Detroit, noting that the effort potentially benefits society as well as the military. "I've talked to seventh- and eighth-graders who [later came] back and joined the Army."
In the suburbs of Phoenix, Ariz., Petty Officer 1st Class Mark Butler also appears before younger students. "Hopefully, when they see a sharp Navy guy in a uniform, they'll remember what they were told about drugs," Butler says.
"You see more of it than years ago, as far as marijuana and different types of drugs," says the petty officer, a recruiter for eight years. "I would say half the people you talk to are currently using."
The same is true in the suburbs and farming communities that rim Sacramento, Calif., where Army Sgt. 1st Class Dustin W. Harrington-Collins has spent a decade trolling for new soldiers. "I've seen the drugs move in -- it's become more of a problem for recruiting," says Harrington-Collins, who turns away 50 percent of the teen-agers because they fail the drug test or have arrest records.
The sergeant sees troubling evidence of drug use, mostly marijuana and cocaine. "The kids get younger and younger," he says.
Evidence of this trend, and of poorly educated students, is mostly anecdotal. Pentagon statistics show no increase in drug use or in low test results. But recruiters say many of the rejects do not show up in the official numbers. Drug-using teens bow out in interviews or refuse to submit to drug tests, they explain. And those who take a practice version of the military's entrance test often score so low that they decline the actual test, which measures math and reading comprehension skills.
"The biggest factor is they can't pass the test," says Cawley, the Navy recruiter in Baltimore.
Some graduate with honors
Recruiters say many of those who fail are high school graduates. Some even received their diploma with honors. In northern Wisconsin and Michigan, Sgt. 1st Class Erik Haversholm turns away nearly a third of potential recruits because they can't make the grade. In San Francisco and its southern suburbs, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph R. Ellis rejects a similar percentage and argues that the schools are not focusing on the basics.
"I asked one applicant, 'What's the value of pi?' " Ellis recalls, referring to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. "She said, 'It depends what you order.' "
In the early 1990s, the Pentagon helped finance a two-year educational initiative that boosted military test scores. Forty-six percent of the youths who enrolled passed the test upon retaking it. But because of the expense, there is no talk among recruiting officials about repeating that effort, despite its success.
The Pentagon's "zero tolerance" toward drugs and its policy of random drug tests for service members are also posing a challenge for recruiters.
"The biggest problem recruiting here is the kids using illegal drugs," says Chief Petty Officer Marc Bettencourt, a Navy recruiter in Bel Air, who turns away half the potential recruits.
About 10 percent are turned away in Catonsville because of drug use, says Petty Officer 1st Class Douglas K. Simpson, who recalls one "good kid" who passed the entrance test only to balk at the military's anti-drug policy. "He said he can't stop smoking marijuana; it's something he likes to do," recalls Simpson.
"Our primary problem is keeping them off dope and in high school," says Sgt. 1st Class Edward C. Lewis, an Army recruiter in southern Missouri, who rejects about 40 percent of applicants because of drug problems. "We just have to work twice as hard."
'Negative sociological trends'
These anecdotes from the field are reverberating in Washington. Gen. Charles C. Krulak, the Marine Corps commandant, told Congress that recruiting is now more challenging because of "negative sociological trends."
"The available market of applicants, which grows only slightly over the next couple of years, is characterized by increased drug and alcohol abuse, broken families, lack of physical conditioning and low propensity for voluntary military service," Krulak wrote two months ago to Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican who serves on the Armed Services Committee.
But Krulak argues that such problems can be overcome with good recruiters and more advertising. The other services agree.
The Army's current recruiting force rose by 761 during the past two years to 5,961 members. And an infusion of $27 million raised the service's advertising budget to $97 million. The Navy hopes to have 4,500 recruiters over the next year, an increase of 700. Its advertising spending is expected to rise from $67 million last year to upward of $80 million.
Still, former and current Pentagon officials fault the Navy for failing to anticipate and react quickly to the downward trends in recruiting.
Frederick Pang, a former assistant secretary of the Navy and Defense, recalls the Navy's response to a projected loss in 1994 of 7,000 sailors. "We challenged the leadership," Pang remembers, saying hard work and extra money proved successful. "The Navy continued to achieve its recruiting goals in succeeding years until recently."
William J. Perry, then-secretary of defense, warned Pentagon officials not to let the military slip into the turmoil of the last Democratic administration, under President Jimmy Carter, Pang says. That era of slashed budgets, recruiting and personnel problems left the military with a "hollow force."
"The message I got was very clear: 'No shortfalls,' " Pang recalls. "I think [the current leadership] got distracted from that."
One top Defense Department official explains that the Navy simply didn't budget enough recruiters or advertising dollars to meet its needs over the past year.
The number of Navy recruiters actually fell, from 4,148 in 1997 to 3,531 at the beginning of 1998. A Navy official conceded that the service also underestimated the number of recruits it would need.
McGann, the head of the Navy Recruiting Command for the past two years, explains that recruiters are detailed a year in advance and that the Navy was unable to send enough recruiters to reach its goal of recruiting 55,321 sailors.
For 1998, the Navy planned for 4,334 recruiters but was able to get only 3,800 into the field by September.
'Issue of the future'
McGann offers a rosier picture for reaching next year's goal.
"I feel confident that as new recruiters arrive, we will be able to do that," she says, highlighting some new ways to attract sailors. For the first time, younger sailors are being urged to serve as recruiters, on the theory that they might enjoy better rapport with potential recruits.
The service has also created a Navy Image Working Group to enhance the Navy's profile and push a stay-in-school, anti-drug message in high schools -- and perhaps junior high and middle schools. "This is the issue of the future," McGann says. "We've got to reach individuals and make them think about the Navy much, much sooner."
Recruiters say increasing their ranks would help, as would higher military pay and benefits to attract enlistees from private industry. Still, many of them are resigned to working longer hours and weeding through more and more undesirable applicants.
"The only thing we can do is screen," says Sgt. 1st Class Rick Tucker, an Army recruiter outside Kansas City, Mo. "I'd rather have a short Army of high-quality individuals than all the foxholes filled with people I can't count on."
Pub Date: 11/03/98