Over the next several years, the Army will reduce its authorized end strength from 490,000 active duty soldiers to 450,000 — and perhaps 420,000 if existing budget caps stay in place. It will be a painful cutback that already has caused the service’s chief of staff to question whether the Army can continue to do all it’s been tasked to do around the world.

But consider for a moment that a significant proportion of that force is made up of what might be called “unnecessary overhead” in the civilian world. Each year, the Army spends millions of dollars recruiting and training thousands more soldiers than it actually needs because it knows that about 20,000 of them won’t make it through their first enlistment, let alone a full career.

“We have an industrial-age model for acquiring talent that’s really just based on volume and experiential attrition,” Maj. Gen. Allen Batschelet, the commander of Army Recruiting Command, said in an interview. “We realize that’s not a model that’s going to work for the future. It relies on large quantities of people coming in through the top end with the hope that enough people will make it through their first enlistment and stay in the Army. That’s not a very good way to acquire talent.”

The Army is searching for better ways through a series of academic summits, the second of which wrapped up earlier this month at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Batschelet’s command is organizing the meetings under the banner of “Recruiting 2025,” noting that the Army, for now, devotes much less intellectual bandwidth to HR strategies than it does to weapons systems: About 10,000 researchers and analysts are working on materiel and only 100 or so are seriously thinking about how to recruit, retain and assign personnel, he said.

The first two summits have attracted papers on a wide variety of topics, including whether it’s time to reexamine the current all-volunteer nature of the U.S. military and the use of big data to realign recruiting strategies. A third meeting is scheduled for December in Washington.

The Army, by its nature, spends an outsized proportion of its budget on personnel compared to the other military services, but Batschelet said his service needs to be more forward-thinking in how it identifies potential recruits. Like the other military branches, the Army’s main measure of quality is whether a recruit has scored highly on her or his Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test and has a high school diploma. And by those measures, the military is getting its best volunteers in recent memory.

“We have the highest quality in decades and we have almost 100-percent high- school graduates right now,” he said. “But I don’t think we’re measuring quality the right way, and I don’t think we’re applying people’s talents in the right places.”

The Army is thinking about alternatives, including “non-cognitive” measures that attempt to assess a potential soldier’s resilience in the face of adversity. It is considering greater use of physical “bio markers” and other measures which could help refine the process of deciding whether a particular 18-year-old is a good fit for military service — whether as an infantryman or as a cybersecurity specialist.

“What you’d have is more of a triad of cognitive, non-cognitive and physical evaluations that would allow us to be more precise in identifying what jobs might be best for you,” Batschelet said. “We need to challenge ourselves more broadly on this. In our next conference, we may even expand into DNA-evaluative tools and press ourselves into being as modern and sophisticated as we can be.”

The Army is still a long way from ditching the ASVAB test or revamping its physical fitness standards, but Batschelet said that’s the point of thinking 10 years down the road.

He said it’s well within the realm of the possible, for example, that the Army’s physical aptitude requirements could change once soldier-worn cyber-kinetic gear becomes part of modern warfare.

“The big issue there would be to solve the issue of durability and energy to power a cyber suit, but I don’t think that’s so far off. I think you’ll see things like that in the next decade or decade and a half,” he said. “Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is working right now on questions about the physicality of having females integrated into combat units. But if everybody’s wearing an exoskeleton of some sort, that’s a conversation we don’t have to have anymore.”

Other potential changes to the ways the Army might identify new recruits have a shorter-term focus, Batschelet said, including how it might use biomarkers to select future soldiers. Those tests could use analyses of blood samples, for example, to help predict whether a new recruit is likely to succeed in his or her preferred military specialty, whether the incoming soldier might want to choose another job field, or whether military service might be a bad fit altogether.

“We already do a crude form of this: Drug and alcohol testing is really a rudimentary biomarker,” he said. “Testing some more proteins or lipids isn’t that much of a leap. If you’re 5-foot-2 and 95 pounds today, they can tell us that you might not get much bigger. That sort of thing isn’t very far off.”

For now, Batschelet is not proposing or implementing any immediate changes in recruiting policy. His main focus, he said, is to explore ways to reform personnel processes that he and other senior military leaders generally agree are outmoded and increasingly misaligned with the talent pool they’re trying to recruit.

“The Army’s now putting a lot of emphasis on the human domain and, if that’s going to be a centerpiece for the future, we’ve got to put a lot more thought into how we approach the development and management of the people who are going to serve with us,” he said. “We have to recognize that we’re in a world where the talent we need is going to be increasingly tough to come by and is going to get more expensive. That’s what these summits are about and there will be no end to them if I have a vote about it.”

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