According to its organizers, BEYA got the Pentagon 300 recruits last year.
Now itwont get any.
Even organizer Tyrone Taborntold Stripesthat the government was set to spend $1.5 million to participate in the event.
Chief Navy Counselor Horace Henry, Chief Navy Counselor Wesley Lewison IX, and Lt. Thomas Stone speak to recruiting prospects during the Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Conference held in Baltimore.© U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Meghan McDonough
Tabron told Stripes he was baffled.
BEYA is the major recruiting activity for everybody, and they put all their money behind this.
Its such an ecosystem, he said.
Military contractors also pulled out of the event at the last minute.
Booz Allen Hamilton, the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, and Elon Musks SpaceX also canceled.
The U.S. Military has been suffering from a recruitment crisis over the past few years.
BEYA and conferences like it are prime recruiting grounds for those kinds of candidates.
To hear Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tell it, thats all because of President Donald Trump.
Weve already seen it in recruiting numbers.
Theres already been a surge since President Trump won the election, Hegseth said during his confirmation hearing.
According to Hegseth and Trump, no one wants to join the military anymore because its too woke.
They werent at the beginning of the crisis.
They werent in the middle of the crisis.
The real reason young people werent joining the military is multifaceted.
Twenty years of losing foreign wars was part of it.
Then there was a pandemic.
And its on this last point that the Army has made a lot of progress.
Starting in 2022, the Army offered what it calls the Future Soldier Prep Course.
This is a 90-day intensive training regime that gets recruits physically and academically ready to enter basic training.
Its training for the training.
The Army hit its 2024 recruiting goal in September of that year.
About a quarter of the candidates had been through the Future Soldier Prep Course.
Another reason the Army saw a surge in recruits last year?Women.
More than 10,000 of 2024s Army recruits were women, thats up 20% from the previous year.
Its easier for them to get in.
They tend not to have criminal records and perform better on the entrance exams.
Theyre also more physically fit.
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