The Army has graduated nearly 25,000 recruits from its Future Soldier Prep Course who have gone on to become soldiers.
The program started in 2022 with the aim to get low-performing recruits up to standards to attend basic training.
The course has run primarily in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and gives new recruits who might not make the physical or academic cutoff to qualify for Army basic training up to 90 days to improve before either heading home or joining basic.
“They go to school for up to 90 days,” said Gen. Gary Brito, commander of Training and Education Command. “They learn how to sleep, how to take a test, to meet the standards of the Army that have not been lowered.”
Both Brito and his command’s senior enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Raymond Harris, emphasized that standards were not altered in the prep course as they spoke to combat unit leaders Tuesday at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference in Fort Moore, Georgia.
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“We met them where they’re at and they meet our standard,” Harris said. “We did not lower a single standard to bring a single recruit into our Army.”
The sergeant major put the number of soldiers that have completed the program successfully in context, equating to “about a division and a half,” with additional soldiers in the Guard and Reserve.
The Army announced it was expanding the course to Fort Moore in April. The expansion added two prep course-specific training companies to the installation.
When launched as a pilot program in 2022, the Army was fresh off a dismal recruiting year, having targeted an active-duty end strength of 485,000 soldiers by the end of fiscal year 2022. The service adjusted that target but fell still fell short, ending up with only 466,000 soldiers.
The next year the service sought an end strength of 473,000 soldiers on active duty but cut that goal to 452,000.
The service implemented a series of recruiting reforms in late 2023, such as creating a career recruiter warrant officer job, restructuring its recruiting command and improving their talent acquisition strategy for finding and training recruiters.
The first cohort of recruiting warrant officers graduated from their training in July.
The reforms appear to be paying off. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in August that the service was on target to hit its goal of recruiting 55,000 new soldiers before October 1, the start of the next fiscal year.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
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