Scott Morley had never heard of West Point. He doesn’t come from a military family, and when he was in high school in the mid-1990s, he never considered serving in the armed forces as a possible career path.

But one day, he got a letter. The prestigious military school had offered Morley a full scholarship and the chance to play football.

As a junior at his Orlando, Florida-area high school, Morley was captain of his school’s football and baseball teams and swimming in academic accolades.

“I came home and I said, ‘Mom, I got a letter from Army. That's a Division 1 school,’” Morley remembered. “She goes, ‘Scott, that's West Point.’ I said, ‘Mom, no, it's Army. They play Navy in December. I saw them on TV.’”

Morley’s mother caught him up to speed on what the letter could mean for his future beyond football, and he accepted the offer. Now, Morley is Lt. Col. Scott Morley, commander of the U.S. Army’s Phoenix Recruiting Battalion.

Behind a leather chair in his office is the famous poster with the classic image of Uncle Sam, his index finger pointing: I WANT YOU FOR U.S. ARMY.

As the nation’s fifth-largest city, Phoenix is an important strategic location for one of the Army’s most critical missions right now: recruitment.

The Army is in the midst of a recruiting crisis. A shrinking pool of young Americans is eligible for enlistment, and many of those who can clear bars for physical fitness and other standards aren't interested in serving, especially when unemployment is low, experts say.

Without new recruits, existing soldiers are redeployed again and again.

But the Army has a plan, and Phoenix is part of that plan. The city is one of 22 priority cities for Army recruitment in 2019, and in the fall, it will be one of five cities where the Army will pilot a new marketing push aimed at getting young urban dwellers with a historically low propensity for service interested in enlisting.

Morley and his team are looking for people like him, young men and women who have never really considered the military, and specifically the Army, as a choice.

“I ended up at West Point having no inkling,” Morley said. “I never wanted to be in the Army. Then I went to airborne school, went to Ranger school, became a Green Beret, having never heard of the option until I got that letter in the mail. I am a case study.”

Phoenix recruitment efforts improve

Morley became the Phoenix Recruiting Battalion’s commander last year. He and his team have their work cut out for them.

In 2018, the Army missed its goal of recruiting 76,500 new soldiers by about 6,500, despite adding an extra $200 million into bonuses.

Phoenix recruiters have been able to beat their recruiting numbers for each of the previous five fiscal years.

They have surpassed their target of a little more than 300 reserve enlistments for this year. But for active-duty enlistments, the battalion is still short of its goal of more than 2,600 enlistments with only a couple of months to go.

“We’re putting in a fighting chance,” Morley said of the active-duty recruiting goal, adding that he’s optimistic the battalion will be able to meet its goal of more than 2,400 active-duty recruits and more than 400 reserve recruits next year. “We’re doing better than we have.”

The upward trend is a sign that the Army’s overhaul of its recruitment program, which includes a new marketing strategy and a flood of new recruiters, might be starting to pay off.

But the Army is battling to successfully make a pitch to a shrinking pool of eligible young people when unemployment is below 4%. More than 70% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 — prime recruitment age — couldn’t meet the Army’s physical, mental and moral standards, according to Pentagon data from 2017.

The Army has resisted lowering standards to meet recruitment goals, but it has offered more waivers that allow recruits that don’t clear certain bars to join. In 2017, almost 2% of Army recruits scored between 10 and 30 points out of 100 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, up from 0.6% in 2016. The Army also has offered more waivers for past marijuana use.

Emma Moore, a research assistant for the Military, Veterans, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said the time has come for the Army to reevaluate some long-standing requirements that don’t affect a soldier’s capacity to do his or her job.

“Going forward, the services might need to be more flexible on physical fitness standards as well as some of the just general medical standards,” Moore said. “There is an incredibly comprehensive list of what is currently disqualifying that I think should just be reviewed across the board.”

‘Billboards are not what kids are looking at’

In the meantime, the Army is shooting to reach potential recruits who can clear existing bars for enlistment. That means raising awareness about the benefits of serving among young people, and letters in the mail like the one Morley received in high school aren’t going to cut it.

“We are now doing a very, very conscientious effort to reach into the virtual spaces,” Morley said. “The old sandwich boards and billboards are not what kids are looking at. They're really not even watching TV commercials anymore. They are on YouTube, they're on Facebook, they are on Instagram. They're listening to Spotify or watching TV on Hulu.”

The Phoenix Recruiting Battalion recently hired a civilian social media coordinator who will be starting work soon, so change is happening. But so far, the Army’s recruiting efforts on digital platforms have been lackluster, Moore said.

“The Army has struggled to be flexible in getting on those apps and understanding them,” Moore said. “Once they realize the importance and get on them, they are usually a little outdated in their messaging and in their levels of interaction.”

The hope is that the new marketing program, coming to Phoenix in the fall, will extend the Army’s digital reach. The program, first tested in Chicago in 2018, has succeeded in increasing the number of young people responding to Army messaging by 16%, according to the Army.

How to get Generation Z to enlist

Moore said that, in its posts, the Army needs to make a pitch that resonates with a population that either has no opinion of the military, or has an opinion colored by negative reports.

In October 2018, the Army unveiled its new advertising campaign, “Warriors Wanted.” Moore says the campaign might have missed the messaging mark when it came to attracting those born in or after 1996, a cohort known as Generation Z.

Instead of focusing on the diverse jobs and sense of camaraderie and purpose the Army offers, the campaign highlights combat, which can turn off potential recruits worried about physical injury and mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, Moore said.

“People who want to look at advertisements like they've put forward in ‘Warriors Wanted’ are probably people who are already interested in service and don't necessarily need to be convinced to take the jump,” she said.

Winning over 'influencers' also a goal

Morley said the Army is working to diversify the pitch it’s making to potential recruits, and perhaps equally importantly, to “influencers,” the parents, coaches, guidance counselors, and other adults in young people’s lives.

“It's breaking down the stereotypes. It's breaking down the assumptions,” Morley said. “It's not always going to end up like you see on the news or in the movies, that my kid is going to come back suicidal, with PTSD, missing limbs. Because that's what scares people.”

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., a combat veteran herself, was scheduled to speak at an Army event in Arizona earlier this summer focusing on recruitment. The event was canceled when President Donald Trump tapped then-Secretary of the Army Mark Esper as acting Defense secretary.

At the time, McSally said recruitment is about getting the word out about service.

"There are so many paths you can take to serve," she said.

The military is often viewed as a last-resort option, Morley said. Some high schools have prevented the Army from making visits or offering students the chance to take its aptitude test, he said.

“Some schools have opted out for fear of blowback from the parents,” Morley said.

When influencers do give the Army a chance to convince them it’s a worthy career option for young people, the pitch is often successful, Morley said.

In March, Morley took a group of community and school leaders on a tour of Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado. The visit shifted the attitude of at least one person representing a high school in Scottsdale, Morley said.

“During the tour, she said, ‘Scott you have blown every bad assumption I made out of the water. I would have steered every kid who asked me away from the Army and I promise you that I will do the opposite from this point on,’” Morley said.

Army is looking for combat soldiers

While the Army does offer a diverse array of careers, Morley acknowledged the Army needs combat soldiers. The Army offers about 150 jobs, ranging from X-ray technician to dental hygienist, but the positions Morley listed as current fiscal year needs are mostly infantry, special forces, air defense and field artillery jobs.

Unlike other military branches, Army recruits can choose the type of work they want to do after training, but the Army is hoping they’ll choose combat positions. To make some of those positions more attractive, it recently began offering a $40,000 bonus for certain combat jobs, Morley said.

Morley said that bonuses are only one example of the benefits the Army offers. Educational and professional training in the Army often translates into real-world certifications for trades such as welding, as well as academic credits, he said.

That’s on top of financial assistance for education offered by the post-9/11 GI Bill, which allows soldiers to divvy up funding between family members, or use it for their own education. Morley himself got a master’s degree from Columbia University that was fully funded by the Army.

Housing and cost-of-living benefits for the families of servicemen and servicewomen are also a unique draw of service. A program called the Partnership for Youth Success, PaYS for short, in which participating civilian businesses across the U.S. guarantee honorably discharged soldiers a job interview is another perk.

What are the consequences of low recruiting?

If the Army doesn’t meet its recruiting mission, current military families will continue to carry the weight of service, Morley said.

“The same families are going to deploy over and over and over again,” Morley said. “And that affects America's sons and daughters who are now in uniform with a spouse, with kids. The Army is in a lot of countries all over the world trying to prevent conflict from happening.”