Most of the military services’ active and reserve components faced recruiting difficulties during the strong economic climate of the late 1990s. As a result, the services stepped up their recruiting to ensure that they would have enough recruits to fill their ranks. Recruiting efforts focus on three initiatives. First, a “sales force” of more than 15,000 recruiters, who are mostly located in the United States, recruit from the local population. Second, these recruiters have financial and other incentives that they can use to convince young adults to consider a military career. Such incentives include enlistment bonuses and college benefits. Finally, the services use advertising to raise the public’s awareness of the military and help the sales force of recruiters reach the target recruiting population and generate potential leads for recruiters. This advertising can include television and radio commercials, Internet and printed advertisements, and special events. DOD believes that advertising is increasingly critical to its recruiting effort because convincing young adults to join the military is becoming more difficult. In 2001, over 70 percent of polled young adults said that they probably or definitely would not join the military, compared with 57 percent in 1976. The number of veterans is declining, which means that fewer young adults have influencers—a relative, coach, or teacher—who have past military experience. Compounding these difficulties, proportionally more high school graduates are attending college. Finally, the perception that service in the military is arduous—and possibly dangerous—can inhibit recruiting efforts. DOD believes that these factors together make the military an increasingly harder sell as a career choice and life-style option for young adults. The Office of the Secretary of Defense is responsible for establishing policy and providing oversight for the military recruiting and advertising programs of the active and reserve components. Within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness is responsible for developing, reviewing, and analyzing recruiting policy, plans, and resource levels. The office provides policy oversight for advertising programs and coordinates them through the Joint Marketing and Advertising Committee. DOD’s strategic plan for military personnel human resources emphasizes the need to recruit, motivate, and retain adequate and diverse numbers of quality recruits. DOD’s recruiting and advertising programs are not centrally managed. All of the active components and some of the reserve components manage their separate advertising programs and work closely with their own contracted advertising agencies. DOD and the services believe that this decentralized approach better differentiates between the service “brands” (i.e., Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines). The Joint Advertising, Market Research, and Studies program, which is funded separately by DOD, exists to address common DOD requirements, such as conducting market research and obtaining and distributing lists of potential leads. The joint program has developed a DOD-wide advertising campaign to target the adult influencers of potential recruits, but this program had not been fully implemented at the time of our review. After most of the services experienced recruiting shortfalls in the late 1990s, DOD reviewed its advertising programs and identified opportunities for improvement. The services, except the Marine Corps, substantially revised their advertising campaigns and slogans and contracted with new advertising agencies. The services told us that their revised campaigns place them in a better position to recruit today’s young adults. Currently, almost all of the services and reserve components are achieving their recruiting goals, and advertising funding has almost doubled since fiscal year 1998. The increases in funding have not been used to buy more national media, such as television commercials. Rather, the funding increases are being directed to other types of advertising, such as special events marketing and the Internet, that are intended to better reach today’s young adults. Advertising funding for DOD increased from $299 million in fiscal year 1998 to $592 million in fiscal year 2003, an increase of 98 percent. Recruiting shortfalls in the late 1990s led to an examination and revision of DOD’s advertising programs. The Army, Navy, and Air Force missed their recruiting quantity goals, while some of the reserve components fell short of both their quantity and quality goals. Following these recruiting shortfalls, Congress asked the Secretary of Defense to review DOD’s advertising programs and make recommendations for improvements. DOD has revamped its advertising programs. The active-duty services, except for the Marine Corps, substantially revised their advertising campaigns and selected new advertising agencies as their contractors. They produced new advertising strategies and campaigns, complete with new slogans and revised television, print, and radio advertisements, along with new brand images defined by distinct logos, colors, and music. The services, in conjunction with their advertising agencies, conducted new research on young adults—their primary target market. During this period, the joint program developed an advertising campaign to target influencers of prospective recruits, as recommended in DOD’s review. In addition to their overall campaigns, all of the services have specialized campaigns to target diverse segments of the young adult population. For instance, the Navy created a Web site, called El Navy, which is designed to better communicate with the Hispanic market, and the Army has specifically tailored radio advertisements to reach the African American market. The services also incorporated a greater variety of public relations and promotional activities, such as participating in job fairs and sponsoring sports car racing teams, as an integral part of their advertising programs. As shown in table 1, there are essentially nine advertising programs that are managed separately by the military services, reserve components, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The active services told us that they are pleased with their new advertising campaigns and agencies, and they believe that the revised and better- funded campaigns have placed them in a more competitive position to recruit young adults. The sluggish U.S. economy has also narrowed employment options and is considered to be an important factor in easing the recruiting challenge. Today, all of the active services are meeting or exceeding their overall recruiting goals. Most of the reserve components are also achieving their recruiting goals. As of June 2003, the Army National Guard was falling short of its recruiting goals because of extensive overseas deployments and the implementation of stop loss (restrictions on leaving the military). Army National Guard officials stated that they expect to meet their goals by the end of fiscal year 2003. Some reserve officers expressed concerns about the negative impact of the recent high deployment rates on future recruiting. The services, especially the reserve components, continue to face challenges in recruiting individuals with some types of specific training or skills, such as medical, legal, and construction, and they have developed some specialized advertising campaigns targeted to recruit them. Since fiscal year 1998, the services have changed how they allocate advertising funding, according to the figures provided by DOD. Grouped into three broad categories, advertising funding includes: (1) events marketing, public affairs and public relations, Internet, and other; (2) national media; and (3) direct mail and miscellaneous recruiting support. One of the categories—events marketing, public affairs and public relations, Internet, and other—has shown the greatest increase as a percentage of the total budget, nearly tripling from around 10 percent in fiscal year 1998 to 29 percent in fiscal year 2003. This increase was used partly to create and produce new advertising campaigns and strategies. Service officials told us that event marketing and public relations activities provide recruiters with greater opportunities to interact with potential recruits and supplement their national media campaigns and other methods of advertising. One example is the Army’s sponsorship of a sports racing car. (See fig. 1.) Internet and Web-site recruiting have also increased significantly from fiscal year 1998 through fiscal year 2003. All of the active military services have increased the amount of advertising on the Internet and have used interactive Web sites to complement their traditional recruiting and advertising methods. The expenditures for the national media category, which includes paid television, radio, and magazine advertisements, have remained relatively constant. This means that this category’s proportion of the growing total advertising budgets has actually declined. Specifically, expenditures for the national media in fiscal year 1998 were more than half of the advertising budget; currently, it represents about 40 percent. Television advertising—which offers tremendous reach to target audiences— dominates this category. Television advertising has remained the single largest advertising expenditure: paid television is still about a quarter of the total advertising budget for all of the military components. DOD’s advertising funding has nearly doubled in the years since 1998 and most of these increases occurred in the earlier years. (See fig. 2.) Total advertising funding for all of the services increased 98 percent, from $299 million in fiscal year 1998 to $592 million in fiscal year 2003. The total DOD advertising budget request to Congress for fiscal year 2004 was $592.8 million. Since fiscal year 1998, DOD’s advertising funding, which is included in DOD’s operation and maintenance appropriations, has increased at a significantly higher rate than the total of all of DOD’s operation and maintenance funding. DOD officials cite media inflation as one reason for increased advertising funding. Inflation for some types of media, especially for television commercials, has been higher than general inflation. However, this is not the reason for all of the increases in advertising funding during this period because not all of the advertising funding is used for media advertising. For example, only about a quarter of advertising funds are currently spent to buy time to run television commercials. Growing advertising costs are only part of a rapidly increasing total investment in recruiting. The rising advertising and overall recruiting costs can be seen in the investment per enlisted recruit—an important bottom- line measure that shows the amount of money spent to enlist each recruit. Today, the services are spending almost three times as much on advertising per recruit than in fiscal year 1990. We examined data collected by DOD from the services, and it showed that the total advertising investment per enlisted recruit rose from approximately $640 to $1,900 between fiscal year 1990 and fiscal year 2003.