The US Army has fallen more than eight percent short of its recruitment goal for the year, army officials said, acknowledging a setback for plans to enlarge a force strained by combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The army is responding in part by increasing the percentage of prospective recruits with low scores on aptitude tests who will be eligible for service, officials said.
"It does have an impact," General Richard Cody, the army's vice chief of staff, said of the recruiting shortfall.
Cody said the army ended the 2005 fiscal year September 30 with a little more than 73,000 new recruits, well short of its goal of 80,000 new recruits.
He said the shortfall means that the army will not be able to increase in size to 502,000 as planned, and instead will lag at around 492,000 to 493,000.
The increase was supposed to give the army a cushion as it builds 10 new combat brigades and increases the size of its combat force by at least 30,000 troops from 315,000 today.
Cody told reporters that even with the recruiting shortfall, the army remains on track to build those new brigades.
But he said it will require moving more solders from the army bureaucracy into combat units, something that he said needed to be done anyway.
"There are many things to deal with this endstrength issue," he said. "One of them is to rebalance what we have in the institutional army and continue to move military spaces and faces from that into the operational army."
Army Secretary Frances Harvey told reporters at a separate press conference that plans call for moving 40,000 soldiers from slots in the army bureaucracy or service schools to the operational units by 2007.
On recruiting, Harvey said the army has decided to adopt Defense Department quality standards that are less demanding than those followed by the army.
The army required that 67 percent of its new recruits score in the top 50 percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, while the Defense Department set a lower 60 percent level for the services as a whole.
"The truth of the matter is, we opened up the aperture and said, 'Okay, we can declare success as long as we stay above or at what DoD's goal was,'" Cody said, using the acronym for the Department of Defense.
"That's to afford the recruiters out there a wider aperture to go after," he said.
Cody said the army met its quality goals this year, and he insisted that maintaining the quality of the force remains a top priority.
"We are not going to lower our standards," he said. "We have a certain percentage that we will not go below for non-high school diplomas. We closed out the year meeting all the floors we wanted to meet in terms of quality."
