The three-star commander of U.S. Army Recruiting Command confirmed this week that the service had reached its Reserve and Special Forces recruiting goals for the first time in 10 years or more.
The Army announced earlier this year that it had met its active-duty recruiting target four months early for a second year in a row, bringing in more than 61,500 soldiers and cementing a dramatic turnaround from two years of missed recruiting missions in 2022 and 2023.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on X that the Army had met its Special Forces recruiting mission for the first time in a decade and a half.
“For the first time in FIFTEEN YEARS, our Special Forces recruiters achieved their mission of 2,940 candidates,” he wrote. “And, for the first time in a DECADE, the U.S. Army Reserves have met their mission of 14,322 future Soldiers in September — two weeks ahead of schedule … The Warriors want IN!”
Speaking at an Association of the United States Army event on Tuesday, USAREC Commander Lt. Gen. Johnny Davis confirmed those statistics and added that the Army National Guard had also met its recruiting target, narrowly hitting its goal number a week before the end of the fiscal year.
Davis, who took command during the recruiting “tough spot” of 2022, said the Army’s current success is allowing recruiters to select for specific high-value roles and needs.
In 2025, USAREC became a three-star command, absorbing other aspects of recruit development and training to become the Army’s primary “force generation” authority. Davis said the change allows the command to track recruits through their training pipelines and into the force and better understand what it takes for them to succeed along the way.
“When you think about precision in today’s environment, because we are doing so well, we can actually firm up many of our operational units with the right talent,” he said. “Instead of just putting more people, you know, maybe the wrong [military occupational specialties], now we’re starting to focus on, OK, if the Army has 10 or whatever number of Patriot battalions, let’s get the right number of 94 Sierras and Tangos or all of those maintenance teams, and that involves a lot of hard work.”
Likewise, he said, recruiters have been able to identify the number of unmanned aerial systems pilots — MOS 15X — the Army wants to train and strategize accordingly. That kind of precision allows for special attention to be paid to the particular physical and skill demands for each MOS and whether recruits are equipped for success in their selected field.
“Now that we own the whole pipeline, [when recruits drop out or are reclassified to a different MOS], we have to do something about that,” he said.
For example, recruits on track to become 92R parachute riggers need a certain kind of upper-body strength to succeed.
“We’re starting to pay attention to that, because we’re losing them in the pipeline,” Davis said.
As the Army seeks to continue its recruiting successes, the service is also looking to reduce the number of soldiers from other MOSs pressed into recruiting tours, Davis said.
“There’s a lot of young sergeants and staff sergeants out there — 82nd, 101st, 1st Armored — and we would come in after their deployments and pluck one or two and send them off to recruiting,” he said. “We want to lower that … and so one of the areas we really want to look at is our permanent recruiting force and what it takes to invest in them.”
Last year, the Army rolled out a new MOS — 42T talent acquisition specialist — in a move to develop a permanent cadre of recruiters. Now, Davis said, service leaders are examining how to further invest in them through training, experiences with outside industry or other opportunities that may increase efficiency and effectiveness.
“Then we can lower the number of young sergeants that we draft from the force, and so that’s where we are right now,” he said. “We’re right in the first year, and it’s looking promising.”
Another key to the Army’s recruiting success, Davis said, is acknowledging the difficulty of recruiting duty by promoting new recruiters immediately upon completion of the Army Recruiting Course. He said that the change to policy, recently announced, has already resulted in new promotions for 2,000 soldiers.
“What I’ve learned when getting it right is, you can’t just fix one thing,” Davis said. “You have to address a bunch of different things.”
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