Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Loh, director of the Air National Guard, speaks to airmen with the 124th Fighter Wing of the Idaho National Guard in August 2022. (Becky Vanshur/U.S. Air National Guard)
WASHINGTON — A combination of problems is making recruiting more difficult for the Air National Guard and the reserve component of the Air Force expects to be up to 4,000 recruits short of its staffing requirements for 2023, its commanding general said Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. Michael Loh pointed to a difficult recruiting landscape that has plagued the entire U.S. military in recent years, including a smaller candidate pool and fewer recruiting resources. He also said signing up new members has been more challenging since the United States went to an all-volunteer force nearly 50 years ago.
“Recruiting has been hard since 1974,” he said Tuesday during a discussion with the Center for a New American Security, a left-leaning Washington-based think tank that studies national security and defense issues. “That’s when the all-volunteer force came out, so it’s been hard.”
In the last two years, however, recruiting troops has become more difficult for most of the services. The Army, Navy and Air Force have already said they expect to miss their recruiting targets this year. The Air Force said in April that it expects to be about 10% short of its recruiting target of 27,000 for 2023.
Some of the issues that are having a major impact on recruiting in the Air Force and Air National Guard, Loh said, are delays related to various administrative changes and lingering effects from the coronavirus pandemic.
“What I have found is that what used to take 30 to 40 days to get a recruit in now takes 90 days. So it’s three times as long,” he said of the delays. “We have had a combination of years that have been more difficult because COVID-19 shut down schools, and really shut down society and … we didn’t have recruiters out there.”
Without access to those schools, recruiters haven’t been able to “influence the influencers,” Loh said, emphasizing the importance of getting enlistment specialists in front of the students who are interested and qualify for service.
“So that has combined to have a [staffing] deficit right now … somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000,” he said.
That range is down a little from the estimate given a couple months ago by Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel, and services. She told the House Armed Services Committee in March that the Air National Guard was projected to be about 4,600 short of its staffing requirements this year. A bump in recruiting in the spring has helped improve recruiting a bit, according to the National Guard Association of the United States.
Loh said a new effort to boost the total Reserve force is intended to make it easier for active-duty airmen to move to the Air National Guard. He said there is also a push to get more recruiters into the field — each of whom usually bring in between 30 and 60 new Air Guard candidates.
He appealed to recruits with one message that he believes could solve the entire crisis if enough young Americans hear it.
“Once [we] get them in, they see what the [Air National] Guard is all about, they like what we offer,” Loh said, noting the retention rates in some units is more than 98%. “So, they like us and they want to stick with us, but [we] have got to get them in the door.”
Loh, director of the Air National Guard since 2020, also expressed some concern Tuesday about a possible lack of funding given the Air Force’s modernization plans. He talked about potential issues with some aircraft — such as A-10 attack aircraft, some F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, C-130s transport planes and KC-135 refueling tankers — and how they will be retired and replaced by other planes.
“The things that keep me up at night … we need a concurrent and proportional recapitalization plan across all those platforms,” he said.
