US Army suspends longtime hometown recruiter assistance program, faces cancellation

For years, Army recruiters have enjoyed flagging a special perk for new Advanced Individual Training graduates: an opportunity to return to their hometowns for 14 days with pay prior to their first duty station, with the understanding they’ll help local recruiters during that time and tell the Army story.

But according to the head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, the new soldiers struggled to hold up their end of the deal.

The service’s decades-old Hometown Recruiter Assistance Program has been suspended, Lt. Gen. Johnny Davis confirmed at a forum hosted by the Association of the United States Army.

And while he said it’s being “looked at” for possible next steps, he also described the built-in problems keeping the service from getting its money’s worth.

“I would tell you, when the program was initiated and really delivered to the Army years ago and executed, that we had some good return on investment — about, you know, one or two percent,” Davis said in response to a question at the forum.

“But, bottom line, what we’ve learned over the years is that 20, 30,000 young superstars, when they were headed back home, were good; they got to go home,” he added. “But they weren’t really working with the recruiters as much as we wanted them to.”

Davis said leaders understood the “human element” of what was happening, in that new graduates were eager to reconnect with family and friends in what amounted to additional uncharged leave. But, he added, the Army had to consider what it was getting out of the arrangement.

Likewise, he said, the Army has in the past allowed National Guard and Reserve soldiers to return home for non-charged leave during the holiday break known as the Christmas Exodus on the understanding that they would support Army recruiting as ambassadors during that time.

“During that Christmas holiday, was there a lot of recruiters in the recruiting stations working with them? No,” Davis said. “So we’re really thinking through: is this return on investment, and is it worth the cost to the Army? Or can we take those funds and spend them in other ways to help our men and women.”

Davis said leaders were now “looking at other ways” to help soldiers get coveted hometown leave apart from the hometown recruiting program.

Army recruiting social media pages began discussing the suspension of the Hometown Recruiter Assistance Program in January, though the service has not publicly addressed the move until now.

HRAP dates to the 1980s. In its most recent form, soldiers had to be selected and approved for the program by a company commander.

In a 2022 Army news release, a recruiting center station commander in Missouri, Staff Sgt. Colton Dunbar, said the success of the program came down to “how the soldiers are leveraged.”

“We try to get the most out of them while they’re here by bringing them to the high school where they graduated and their communities to show everyone that this person was in your community six months ago as a civilian, but look at them now,” he said in the release. ”It helps to break down any barriers because they know that person in uniform — it helps show we are people just like everybody else.”

But from early on in the program, a lack of success metrics and specific service requirements have limited HRAP’s success.

A 1983 study from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences found that it was hard to evaluate the usefulness of program participants, because it was hard to track their impact outside of foot traffic to the recruiting office.

It also suggested, though, that there were nevertheless non-quantifiable benefits to having new soldiers present and visible in their hometown.

“Aides are credited for individuals they brought to the recruiter who subsequently enlist, but the total effect of the aide’s efforts is more subtle than the sum of their recruits,” the study found. “For example, aides can ‘plant seeds’ or lay the groundwork months in advance of an enlistment decision and receive no credit for an enlistment that occurs months after his or her departure.”

The Army hasn’t said when it will make final decisions on the way forward for HRAP.