Hmmm… usually the military only has real trouble recruiting when the economy is growing, jobs are plentiful and wages are high. The U.S. economy overall has been stagnant at best for the past eight years. The U.S. Air Force has always had the highest reenlistment rate of all the armed services; the U.S. Marine Corps has the lowest. This makes perfect sense. After all, people join the military because they seek adventure; they leave the military when they decide they want a normal life again. The Air Force has always had a reputation for being solicitous of the creature comforts of its personnel. The service openly admits that it does so because it needs to attract people with technical skills and education, people who have options in life. So they make it worth their while to join, and to stay in. The AF then seeks people who are looking for a technical career; it doesn’t need or want people who are “running away to join the circus”. Since World War II there was never a shortage of people who want a job where they get to fly, so the AF could always afford to be choosy.

Why are the Zoomies currently experiencing such trouble with personnel retention, in the midst of a never-ending recession too? For one it suggests AF personnel are being worn out by the constant overseas deployments. The USAF has been at war constantly, enforcing no-fly zones and on other combat ops, since the Persian Gulf War 26 years ago. At the same time it has shrunk from 134 fighter squadrons down to 55, as this article mentions. Which means more of the same people are being sent overseas, and away from home and family, more often. We have an interventionist foreign policy mismatched with an isolationist sized military. And now the government is broke and heavily in debt to boot. Which means the service must “do more with less”. No doubt AF personnel are also leaving because they are disgusted with all the vexatious PC nonsense that is afflicting all the services. It strikes me then that this a canary in the mine indicator for the entire U.S. Military, if the Air Force is experiencing such significant shortfalls in recruiting and retention.