Army Set To Expand Basic Train­ing Amid Flood Of New Recruits

The U.S. Army is expand­ing the num­ber of recruits it can send to basic train­ing by open­ing a slew of new train­ing camps in Mis­souri and Okla­homa.

Recruit­ment into the Army has surged this fis­cal year, which start­ed in Octo­ber. By Jan­u­ary, the Army had already hit the halfway point toward its recruit­ing goal for the year. After years of strug­gling to hit its goals, the branch has seen a recruit­ing surge in the past few months.

Many of those recruits could end up at new basic train­ing camps being set up across Fort Leonard Wood, Mis­souri, and Fort Sill, Okla­homa. The ten addi­tion­al train­ing units expect­ed to be built can train up to 9,600 recruits at a time, accord­ing to Military.com.

“Expand­ing basic train­ing capac­i­ty is a result of suc­cess­ful recruit­ing efforts and the Future Sol­dier Prepara­to­ry Course,” Lt. Gen. David Fran­cis, com­man­der for the U.S. Army Cen­ter for Ini­tial Mil­i­tary Train­ing, said in a state­ment. “This is a great prob­lem to have as we con­tin­ue to train the most capa­ble and lethal sol­diers for our Army.”

The Future Sol­dier Prepara­to­ry Course is a pro­gram recent­ly launched by the Army to help poten­tial recruits meet the branch’s body weight and aca­d­e­m­ic stan­dards. The pro­gram has helped bol­ster recruit­ing in recent years.

Recruit­ment has boomed in the first quar­ter of the 2025 fis­cal year, how­ev­er.

For­mer Army Sec­re­tary Chris­tine Wor­muth said in mid-Jan­u­ary, just before Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump took office, that the Army is on track to bring in 81,000 new recruits: 61,000 for 2025 and anoth­er 20,000 in a delayed entry pro­gram for 2026.

“What’s real­ly remark­able is the first quar­ter con­tracts that we have signed are the high­est rate in the last 10 years,” Wor­muth said. “We are going like gang­busters, which is ter­rif­ic.”

Wor­muth, who served as for­mer Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s Army Sec­re­tary, denied that poor recruit­ing and missed goals in recent years were caused by mil­i­tary lead­er­ship and cul­ture becom­ing “woke.”

Trump cam­paigned on get­ting “woke” out of the mil­i­tary by scrap­ping pro­grams con­nect­ed with DEI and oth­er con­tro­ver­sial agen­das. Defense Sec­re­tary Pete Hegseth has pri­or­i­tized refo­cus­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary on lethal­i­ty and mis­sion suc­cess. He said in his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing in the Sen­ate that the military’s focus on oth­er issues has deterred men, espe­cial­ly white men, from sign­ing up.

Dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion, Hegseth cred­it­ed Trump’s elec­tion with the surge in recruit­ing for the mil­i­tary.

“We’ve already seen it in recruit­ing num­bers,” Hegseth said. “There’s already been a surge since Pres­i­dent Trump won the elec­tion.”