As the Marine Corps faces off with other military services to recruit a dwindling number of high schoolers, the leathernecks are using an approach that is so off-putting that it attracts a different kind of recruit, including the outgoing commandant.
Instead of talking up money and jobs that the other services hype, Gen. David H. Berger told a Heritage Foundation audience on Tuesday that the Marines use a hard-to-get campaign.
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“We have a brand, and the brand is, ‘I’m not sure you’re good enough to be a Marine,’” the four-star general said.
Berger recalled his own first encounter with a Marine while he was on a Navy scholarship at Tulane University in the late 1970s. He had never encountered a member of the Marine Corps until he met a gunnery sergeant during ROTC training.
“I’d never met a Marine before. Never seen one but was instantly drawn to this person, this guy, his leadership, the way he carried himself, the way everybody respected. I’m like, I don’t know what that is, but I want that,” he recalled.
So he approached him and asked, “I’m on a Navy scholarship. Is it possible to switch? He goes, ‘I’m not sure you’re good enough.’ And he told me to go away.”
That challenge won him over. Berger said, “Over the next three years in college, it was clear, that, that service and personal example and because everything about it, that’s what I wanted to do. It’s the same thing today. Same thing.”
Berger, whose son is a Marine Corps recruiter, has aggressively changed and updated the process and targets the Marine Corps is interested in. As a result, he said that the focus is heavier on retaining expensively trained Marines and less on recruiting new Marines.
In a high-tech force that takes longer to train, he said, retention is critical.
“That’s driving us more into the we have to retain more. And we will still recruit, of course, we’ll still have a lot of young Marines. But if you’ve been in the Marine Corps for four years and you’re now a sergeant or a senior corporal, I need to keep you. We need to keep you now. Right now, you have the experience and the skills and the leadership we need. Retain more, recruit probably a little bit less,” the general said.
As for the current recruits, Berger dismissed reports that they aren’t up to snuff. He said they are smarter than the old recruits, though they learn differently.
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“The Marines, soldiers, sailors, airmen today, smarter than you and I were when we came in, learn in a different way, faster in some ways. They have different experiences in different backgrounds,” he said to interviewer and Heritage fellow Dakota Wood, who retired from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel.
“I would debunk all that stuff about today’s youth are not ready, not resilient, not whatever. Absolutely the opposite of what I see. But they’re different. They asked why about a million times,” he said.
