Since the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago, recruiting across the military services has been in crisis. Many recruiters lost access to schools that were shuttered. The military also has been increasingly the subject of political attacks – mainly from the right of the aisle condemning the services as “woke.” We’ll get into that in the episode.

My colleague, Steve Beynon – an Army veteran and Military.com’s Army reporter – and I wanted to see what it was like for recruiters on the ground floor. How do they recruit? Why were they at the Great American Outdoors show? Are the problems that gain so much traction in Washington the same ones that recruiters on the ground are experiencing?

We talked to people who approached the recruiting booth and asked them why they were interested in the Army. Some of the answers were pretty par for the course, and others were a bit surprising.

Appearing in this episode: Steve Beynon, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Sen. Tom Cotton, Terri, Sgt. First Class Nickolas Gordon, Staff Sgt. Jonathan Volz, Lt. Col. Thomas Geisinger, Drew F. Lawrence, Carter