The head of the Department of the Air Force’s recruiting efforts, who has overseen the service’s turnaround from missing its goal for the first time since 1999 to hitting it three months early, believes those slumps are solidly in the rearview mirror.
Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein has served as the commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service since June 2023 — a role he’s set to leave later this month. In an interview with Military.com where he looked back on the Air Force’s recruiting turnaround, the one-star general said he believes the service is on some of the best footing it’s seen in recent years after a notable rebound from a pandemic-era slump.
“I would absolutely say that Department of Air Force recruiting is on solid ground,” Amrhein said Thursday. “I can’t deny that there were some attributable issues that we had to work through and understand coming out of the pandemic.”
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Late last month, the Air Force and Space Force announced they had hit their recruiting goals three months ahead of the fiscal-year deadline — just like the Army and the Navy. The successes were quickly claimed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as being partially attributable to President Donald Trump’s reelection, but there have been efforts and policy changes in the works since well before the November election that helped turn the tide, experts told Military.com.
Changes by the Air Force prior to the new administration included expanding recruiters; increasing processing time for recruits’ medical paperwork; tracking monthly goals; establishing a pilot program that allowed certain recruits who tested positive for THC to continue on; loosened tattoo policies; and updating body fat percentage standards to be in line with the Department of Defense’s more generous guidelines.
Taren Sylvester, a research assistant for the National Security Human Capital Program at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told Military.com after the service hit its 2025 recruiting goals that “it’s a lot of different work in the recruiting forces and in how recruiting is set up that is making an impact today.”
Amrhein pointed to the service’s strong successes in fiscal 2024, which carried over into 2025.
“What I can say is that over the last two years, we’ve had unbelievable success in bringing our airmen and Guardians in,” Amrhein said. “We’ve continued that success in [fiscal 2025] to ensure that we could hit that goal that was a much higher goal even than we were planning when I got into the seat.”
In late October, already one month into fiscal 2025 recruiting and just prior to Trump’s election victory, recruiting heads from all the military services, including the Air Force, held a briefing at the Pentagon to tout the prior year’s recruiting successes and trends.
Alex Wagner, the former assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs, pointed to that press conference as an example that the tide had already been turning for Air Force recruiting. He told Military.com in an interview on Friday that it’s not surprising for the current administration to take credit for those successes.
“There’s no doubt that every administration, Republican or Democratic, is going to try to take advantage of moments that occur on their watch to highlight and bolster their agenda,” Wagner said. “What I would say, though, is that Hegseth’s team’s lack of depth and understanding the complexity of the recruiting enterprise, combined with a lack of leadership in key political positions, has made it easy for them to believe that what occurred on their watch was their doing.”
The Department of the Air Force hit its 2025 goal on June 27 after it announced it had “sent nearly 25,000 of the 30,000 contracted recruits to Basic Military Training” and the rest were set to be shipped by the end of September.
The Air Force had to curb its originally more ambitious goal of around 33,000 airmen in 2025 due to an ongoing continuing resolution — a congressional stopgap budget measure known as a CR that keeps funding at the prior year’s levels in the absence of a budget bill.
Amrhein said even with that goal reduction, the service was managing to bring in a significant number of recruits.
“Even with the 3,000 reduction that we had to take due to the annual CR, we still are delivering 30,000 which, when you look back on what was delivered in ’23, that’s 6,000 more airmen and Guardians that we put in the Air Force in less than two years’ time,” Amrhein said.
Amrhein’s predecessor warned at the end of fiscal 2022 that it had hit its active-duty recruiting goals by dipping into its delayed entry program, or DEP, Military.com previously reported.
Now, the Department of the Air Force has built up its delayed entry program to about 15,000, which is a 10-year high, Amrhein told Military.com.
While building up the delayed entry program puts the service in a safer space, other larger issues facing Air Force recruiting may be on the horizon.
Wagner said it’s likely fewer Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 will be eligible for military recruitment in the near future. Military.com first reported in 2022 that 77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, drug usage, or mental and physical health issues.
While Wagner acknowledges some ongoing efforts, such as Hegseth announcing the creation of a recruiting task force last month, the former Air Force official worries those efforts could be misguided.
“So these challenges and headwinds are going to persist,” Wagner said. “And it’s actually going to require continuation of the current initiatives, but also new initiatives, new efforts and new insights by an administration that’s quick to claim credit but hasn’t really put in place any new solutions to date.”
Hegseth’s recruiting task force directive was released on June 13, and the first report is due in 30 days, according to the memo — which would be July 13.
Amrhein is set to leave his role on July 18 and will become the next director of operations for Air Education and Training Command. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Nelson will take over the position.
He told Military.com he’ll miss the people — the recruiters and the families, the new airmen and Guardians, the staff of the Air Force Accessions Center — the most. He said he and his wife, Cathy, have connected with all of those people across the world as part of his role, and saw those recruiting successes come to fruition firsthand.
“I’ve been all across the United States. I’ve been to massive events. I’ve been to small events. I’ve been over to the Pacific and Europe and seen our recruiters and their families and the new members that are coming in there,” Amrhein said. “It’s just been awe-inspiring to watch this come together.”
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