Fresh off “ringing the bell” to announce success in meeting fiscal year 2024 recruiting goals, the Air Force recruiting enterprise is turning its attention to the future with a major restructuring effort aimed at streamlining communications and making it easier to shift or share resources between shifts.
The new plan will also see the Air Force bring in 370 additional recruiters.
Beginning Oct. 1, the Air Force Recruiting Service will begin a merger with Air University’s Jeanne M. Holm Center, which administers the service’s Reserve Officer Training Corps and officer and noncommissioned officer training programs, to form a single entity: the Air Force Accessions Center.
The change had been in the making for nearly a year, driven by a desire to remove silos and build organizational consistency, Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein, chief of recruiting for the Air Force, told Air Force Times in an exclusive interview.
“You have a bit of a bifurcated process, where we at the Air Force Recruiting Service recruit for [Officer Training School]but when you do the transfer, it goes to a completely different organization,” Amrhein said. “What we want to be is more effective and agile, and have everything under one command.”
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One practical reason for a joint approach emerged during the recently concluded recruiting year, when the Air Force’s ROTC recruiting program fell short by 127 assignments, Amrhein said.
Ultimately, the service was able to convene an additional officer recruiting board and supplement the missing ROTC accessions with conventional officer recruitment, but the process was more rushed and ad hoc than it could have been, he said.
“If we could have seen it earlier, we probably could have designed it differently,” Amrhein said.
The merger will take place in phases, with the full transition to the new structure completed in October 2025.
The new Air Force Accessions Center will continue to fall under the Air Education and Training Command, which officials said will also be renamed Airman Development Command at a future date.
The move will not force a reallocation of troops in the Air Force recruiting enterprise, although some redeployments on the ground could eventually occur, officials said. While it is clear that recruiting leaders, including Amrhein, are still developing their vision of what the fully realized Air Force Accessions Center will look like, he indicated that it will help planners see recruiting opportunities and needs that exist in the past may have been missed.
“We actually have a year to build the most effective, efficient and agile overall organization,” says Amrhein. “We have a few, I call them red-teaming experts, to make sure we don’t miss any blind spots. But what we look like now is probably not what we’ll look like in October, and that’s why we have this year to really look at where there are opportunities, or if there are gaps and seams, to fill those for the final organizational structure.”
If unity and greater efficiency translate into more entries, the change will come at a critical time. While the Air Force narrowly missed its goal of recruiting 27,100 new enlistees in fiscal 2024, it faces a surge this year, with a target of 32,500 new enlisted members. It also follows the launch of the Air Force Warrant Officer Training School at the Holm Center at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, in July.
The first 80 of the 370 planned additional recruiters attended school training in August, Amrhein said. And while this recruitment plus-up is expected to help the service achieve its larger recruitment goal, Amrhein acknowledged that it also comes with challenges.
“You have to be careful not to oversaturate a recruitment agency,” he said.
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To prevent that, he says, the Air Force is creating “flexible recruiting cells” with three recruiters each who can travel temporarily to cities or regions to organize events or develop leads.
“So that gives us a little bit more flexibility, and that increase gives us some sustainability,” Amrhein said.
Finding ways to get a better success rate from the Air Force ROTC and Junior ROTC programs could be a big benefit to the restructuring, Amrhein said. For example, he plans to explore the possibility of bringing back a two-year ROTC program, in addition to the existing four-year program, so that more students can pursue an Air Force recruitment path.
“Sometimes people get inspired, interested or drawn to the military or our Air Force and Space Force at different times,” he said. “And do we have a system that is agile enough that we can now collaborate or use? [Officer Training School] perhaps different from just the four or three year program that ROTC is today.
In another example of finding efficiencies, Amrhein pointed to the approximately 40 newly commissioned second lieutenants – known as “gold bars” – who are tasked with working with recruiting squads to find likely candidates for ROTC programs. Under the new construct, he said, these young officers could be able to serve recruiting goals more broadly, looking holistically at the needs of the Air Force.
Ultimately, he said, this move should ensure that all elements of Air Force recruiting work more collaboratively toward their common goals.
“I think what we’re going to see is that as we start talking at the upper echelon with staff and commands, the integration will happen sooner and it will happen more often,” Amrhein said. “That is a goal of mine as commander of the Accession Center: to promote cross-talk and ensure that authorities are the most effective operation across the cradle-to-grave spectrum.”
