The National Guard: The Pizza Offensive

The real hand-wringing began around March of last year, when for a sixth straight month the Army National Guard missed its recruitment goal. Tasked with bringing in about 60,000 new "citizen soldiers" each year, guard brass worried they'd fall short by up to 25 percent in fiscal 2005. A main reason for the decline: long deployments in Iraq and a rising casualty toll for the guard (17 died that month, at a time when guard brigades accounted for 40 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq). To prevent a further slide in sign-ups, recruitment and retention officers began shuttling between their headquarters in Crystal City, Va., and the eighth-floor office of the guard's Arlington ad agency, Laughlin, Marinaccio & Owens. "We had one of those what-are-we-going-to-do moments," recalls Doug Laughlin, who runs LM&O.

What they did--doubling their ad budget, boosting enlistment and recruitment bonuses and adding thousands of recruiters across the country--helped put the guard back on track. From last October to this April, recruitment was up 49 percent over the same period the previous fiscal year. With the military scaling back the guard's deployment in Iraq in recent months, top officers say more brigades are now available to take on other missions: tending to natural disasters at home and, as of last week, helping to police immigration along the Mexican border. But the recruitment ordeal underscores a sobering reality for the entire military: the longer the war in Iraq drags on, the harder recruiters will have to work to keep enlistment up.

The revamped campaign echoed a trend in advertising: less Old Media, more Net, more niche. To appeal to 18- to 25-year-olds, the guard offered free iTunes downloads for surfers willing to scroll through a Web recruitment pitch. That gimmick drew 200,000 young people in under a year, 9,000 of whom went on and talked to a recruiter. Magazine ads gave way to promotions at NASCAR races and rodeos. At one point, Laughlin bought up 328,000 pizza boxes and had them printed with photos of handsome guard members and a slogan that highlights a key enlistment benefit: "You've paid for the pizza, now how about your tuition?" The boxes were given to mom-and-pop pizzerias across the country at no charge. But the savviest move was a decision by the guard to pay its members $1,000 for each newcomer they enlist and another $1,000 when the recruit gets to basic training. Net gain: 6,174new members since December, according to Lt. Col. Mike Jones, the guard's deputy division chief for recruiting and retention.

There may be more than a good ad campaign at work. Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan, says the guard, like other branches, has set lower standards to meet recruitment goals, dragging down the overall quality of the units. For instance, some high-school dropouts are being accepted for the first time in years, he says. (A guard spokesman said the claim was generally untrue but gave no details.) Andrew Krepinevich, of Washington's Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, points out that because guard units can be deployed for only two years out of five, sophisticated recruits probably realize their chances of winding up on war duty are lower now than at any time since the attacks of September 11. For the guard, that should ease the task of recruitment. For other branches of the military struggling with the same problem: pizza, anyone?

© 2006