Roughly 15,000 recruits in the past two years used one of the Army‘s latest recruiting initiatives that allows new soldiers to pick their first duty station, data from the service reviewed by Military.com shows.
The top five locations of choice for 2022 and 2023 were Fort Cavazos, Texas; Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Fort Carson, Colorado; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. However, those bases don’t necessarily represent popular areas, as duty station options for soldiers are usually in flux and limited based on the new recruit’s job and the needs of the Army at the time they enlist.
In total, roughly 13% of the 112,000 new recruits across the last two years elected to choose their first duty station, service data shows. As the Army faces a historic recruiting slump, the initiative allowing duty station choices is one of the most significant efforts in recent years to court Gen Z, a generation of recruits who are more reluctant to leave their hometowns and want some control over where they live, according to internal Defense Department research.
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Broadly, the top bases for the first duty station of choice are in order of size, presumably meaning those installations have the most empty slots to fill with junior troops. The only outlier was Fort Liberty, North Carolina, home to the Army’s famed 82nd Airborne Division, which…
