10,000 More Recruits in 18 Months: How Easing Rules Made the Difference

Easing the rules that barred some recruits from joining the Air Force helped bring in 10,000 Airmen and Guardians over the past 18 months, said the head of Air Force Recruiting, Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein on Oct. 30.  

The rule changes that enabled those recruits to join the force came out of work by a cross-functional team organized to identify and eliminate “barriers to service” that were driving otherwise qualified recruits to seek out other options, including joining the Army and Navy.

But one thing the Air Force is not doing is dropping standards, Amrhein said. That includes putting potential recruits through preparatory classes to help them pass the Armed Service Vocational Aptitude Battery of tests.  

Victory Lap 

Amrhein and the other services’ recruiting chiefs spoke to reporters in the Pentagon briefing room to celebrate meeting recruiting goals for 2024 after falling far short in 2023. 

Amrhein credited the reduction in barriers and the team that worked on the problem in the spring of 2023, led by now-Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin. That team advocated to allow recruits in who have small hand and neck tattoos; allowing some qualified applicants a chance to retest after testing positive marijuana use; and enabling accelerated naturalization for non-citizens, among other changes.

All told, the changes enabled “more than 10,000 total force Airmen and Guardians to join the Air Force or space force” over the past 18 months or so, Amrhein said. That’s equivalent to about 22 percent of the 44,318 recruits his command brought into the Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Air National Guard, and Space Force in fiscal 2024.  

As he did at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference last month, Amrhein credited the success not to one particular change but to “a broader shift in how we approach recruitment.” 

“Multiple levers such as barrier removal, incentive adjustment, increasing medical review support, and a honed focus on recruiter development all played a critical role to our total force recruiting successes,” he said. 

The single biggest factor, however, was change the Air Force’s rules on body fat. Last year, the Air Force dropped its service-unique requirements and aligned USAF body composition standards with the minimum requirements set by DOD policy.

“Since then, we’ve brought in over 5,800 Airmen [thanks to that change],” Amrhein said. “And under that DOD standard, we’ve had one washout of BMT for physical fitness reasons.” ”

Amrhein said he’s frequently asked if the standards have declined. He says no: “The [physical fitness test] standards have not changed for our basic training and that policy adjustment offered 5,800 very high-quality folks to come into our service, and we lost one person for it.” 

Higher Goals Ahead 

Now the Air Force Recruiting Service is one month into a new fiscal year with a substantially higher goal: 49,579 total force recruits, up 11 percent from fiscal 2024. The goals break out this way: 

  • 32,500 recruits for the Active-Duty Air Force 
  • 7,600 for the Air Force Reserve 
  • 8,679 for the Air National Guard 
  • 800 for the Space Force 

Amrhein said those goals will be achieved with the help of 370 new recruiters and support personnel, but the emphasis will remain on individual recruits who can do the job—not recruits who need a crash course for to meet physical fitness or academic standards. 

“There’s not the overarching, compelling requirement that we’ve seen” to create such programs, he said. 

The Army and Navy, which have higher recruiting goals and, for many jobs, lower academic standards, have benefited greatly from their prep courses. The Army has graduated nearly 25,000 recruits from its course over the past two years and the Navy put more than 5,000 recruits through its program in the past year. 

Students at the U.S. Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory Course work on math skills during a class at Fort Jackson, S.C. The Air Force does not provide a comparable course and has no plans to do so. (U.S. Army photo by Jason Norris)

Like the Air Force, the Marine Corps also has refrained from adding prep classes.

But the Air Force does provide some assistance to prepare incoming recruits for the intensely rigorous special warfare program, among its toughest-to-fill jobs. 

“For our Special Warfare accession pipeline, we do have a very deliberate development program for them,” he said. “So as folks identify or are interested in the Special Warfare Air Force Specialty Codes, there is a very deliberate development program, both from a mental resiliency standpoint, but also a very in-depth physical training regimen to prepare them for that pipeline.”

Those preparations are not the same, however, as a special course, he said.