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Fill in the NumbersHow the Pentagon sowed confusion with an incomplete recruitment report.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009, at 3:43 PM ET

On Oct. 16, I wrote a column about the fishy numbers in a recent Pentagon report on military recruitment. The report claimed that recruitment was up, but the numbers seemed to indicate the opposite. What was going on? This is the story of how I got that story—and how I learned, through a jumble of phone briefings afterward, how I got it both right and wrong.

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The tale begins on Oct. 15, when I read a Pentagon report boasting that military recruitment this year—especially in the Army—had exceeded its goals. The Army's goal for fiscal year 2009 was to recruit 65,000 new soldiers; the actual number of recruits was 70,049.

News stories inferred from these numbers that more young men and women were joining the Army, despite the near-certainty that they would soon be shipped off to war. But looking at the Pentagon's reports from the previous two years, I discovered that this was an illusion. Recruitment hadn't gone up; rather, the recruitment goal had gone down. In fiscal years 2007 and 2008, the goal was to recruit 80,000 new soldiers. And the Army met the goal each year (though only by lowering standards of quality). This year, the Army didn't have to lower standards, but the number of actual recruits dipped by nearly 10,000.

Before writing all this up, I called the Army public affairs office to make sure I was comparing numbers that were truly commensurate. One official explained that the Army lowered its recruitment goal because retention went up. The Pentagon report didn't include numbers for retention, so the official sent me the data. It turned out that the Army had set a goal of getting 55,000 soldiers to re-enlist but in fact got 68,000. This seemed to explain the lowering of recruitment targets: No need to enlist new soldiers if experienced soldiers were re-enlisting at higher rates.

But then I looked at retention reports from previous years, and it was the same story: The retention goal, too, had been lowered. Last year's goal was 65,000, and in fact 72,000 soldiers had re-enlisted.

So this was the picture I was looking at, a picture based on the Army's own numbers: Recruitment was down 10,000, and retention was down 4,000. It seemed clear that the Army was shrinking, not expanding. And that's what I wrote in my column.

The next day, I got a call from one of the same Army public affairs officials who had talked with me the previous two days. He wanted me to sit down with some officers from G1, the Army's personnel directorate, to straighten out my misconceptions.

So on the afternoon Oct. 20, I spent a half-hour on the phone with a roundtable of officers, led by a colonel who is chief of the Army's enlisted careers systems division. Before the call, they'd e-mailed me a chart more detailed than the one in the Pentagon's report.

This new chart displayed the same numbers I'd gathered for my column for recruitment and retention. But it also noted that the Army's "end-strength"—the total number of active-duty soldiers—had risen from 543,645 in at the end of fiscal year 2008 to 553,044 at the end of FY 2009. (The Pentagon report that I'd written about did not include end-strength numbers.)

I told the officers that this new chart made me even more confused. How could it be that recruitment and retention had gone down by about 16,000, but end-strength had gone up by more than 9,000?

One of the officers explained that many soldiers re-enlist a year or two before their terms are up and that they are not counted in the totals for retention. This seemed plausible. I asked if someone could send me the data on how many soldiers re-enlisted early in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Sure thing, no problem. Thank you very much. End of conversation.