Peacetime Recruiters Beat Bushes : Military: These days, the armed services have to be persistent. Even as the services are reducing forces, they may be hitting a recruiting drought.

Walter Musgrove in the U.S. Navy? The 20-year-old Taco Bell employee seemed a bit skeptical.

“What’s it like sending people back into slavery?” he inquired acidly when Navy recruiter Kevin Presley approached him at a Prince George’s County, Md., shopping mall.

That sounded like an invitation to get lost, but Presley cheerfully pressed on. “Slavery?” he parried. “Did they give people free medical and dental then? Thirty days paid vacation?”

After several minutes, Presley had persuaded Musgrove--against all odds--to make an appointment at his office to learn more about the Navy and consider enlisting.

These days, the armed services have no choice but to be persistent. It’s one of the ironies of the post-Cold War military: Even as the services are reducing forces, senior commanders are worried that they are in the early stages of a recruiting drought.

The military has been aggressively pruning the number of employees in the upper ranks, but that hasn’t eliminated the need to be feeding the front end of the career pipeline with a steady stream of young men and women to fill entry-level positions.

So far, the Pentagon has little immediate cause for alarm. All the services have met or exceeded recruiting targets so far this year, although recruit quality--as measured by aptitude tests and the percentage of high school graduates--has slipped a shade in recent years.

But two large trends suggest trouble in the future. The number of people age 17 through 21 this year is the smallest it has been since the elimination of the draft in January, 1973, according to census figures. At the same time, surveys show the enthusiasm of young people for serving in the military is on the wane.

The Youth Attitude Tracking Surveys conducted annually by the military show that the percentages of men and women ages 16 through 21 who describe themselves as definitely or probably likely to serve on active duty have been dropping steadily, and are now at the lowest level in a decade. In 1989 nearly 17% of the young men surveyed said they would be likely to serve in the U.S. Air Force; in 1993 that figure had dropped to just over 11%.

Since 1992, the Navy has exerted the least appeal on young men of all the services. In 1993, only a little more than 8% expressed likely interest on the attitude survey.

Rear Adm. Marsha J. Evans, the head of Navy recruiting, sees several reasons behind the drop in enthusiasm among young people. One is that so much of the publicity the military has received in recent years is about the force growing smaller.

Indeed, in 1987 there were 2.17 million Americans in uniform, compared to 1.64 million today. Logically enough, young people assume the services aren’t hiring. But the assumption is wrong. The armed services are hiring about 200,000 people a year, 63,000 last year in the Navy alone.

Another obstacle, Evans said, is that since the end of the mandatory military service, most of the adults who serve as role models for young people aren’t likely to promote the armed services as a career path.

“Fewer and fewer of the centers of influence--moms and dads, a high school counselor, a coach, someone at church--have had military experience,” Evans said.

To counter this trend and establish their own emotional connections with the younger generation, the services are doing their best to get hip.

A Navy ad that plays on MTV is itself a miniature rock video, with flashing images of sailors and pilots at sea, pulsing music, and lyrics that boast of the career advantages to joining the service: “If you’re ready, if you’re smart, here’s the place to get your start. . . . “

Army advertisements, likewise, stress the training and educational opportunities. “I am soldier,” croons the voice in one spot, “I am skilled and smart, I’ve got the training, I’ve got the heart.”

At a time when many young people question the relevance of the military to their lives, appeals to self-interest make the most effective ads. “The message is: ‘It’s going to do something useful for you,’ ” said William J. Green, an executive at Young & Rubicam, which does the Army’s advertising.

Appeals to patriotism and sense of duty generally fall flat. “People say, ‘Don’t lay a guilt trip on me.’ It becomes kind of a turnoff,” Green said.

For years, advertising budgets at the services dropped precipitously--from about $270 million for all the services in 1986 to less than $110 million this year. But that trend has leveled off recently, and advertising budgets should grow modestly in coming years, according to Pentagon officials.

Ultimately, however, it’s not flashy advertising that persuades young people to join the military. That job remains where it always has been: with individual recruiters.

It’s a position that favors ebullient personalities--like Navy recruiter Presley. On a recent afternoon at Landover Mall, Presley displayed the fervor of a traveling missionary with the peskiness of those salesmen that call just as you’re sitting down to dinner.

He has a talent for getting people locked in conversations about the virtues of the U.S. Navy without their realizing how they got there.

“Hey, where’d you go to high school?” he’d ask some young person, acting as though he recognized an acquaintance. Soon enough, the talk would pivot to whether the person was working, and then on to whether they’d ever thought about the Navy.

Like other salesmen, Presley has learned not to let rejections bring him down. Many of the young people he talked to seemed to reflect the very disdain for service that the military’s own surveys discovered.

“The military life? I don’t think so,” declared Melissa Roberts, 25, after talking with Presley. “I went to Catholic schools for 12 years--I’ve had enough discipline.”

Some people--like Musgrove, the Taco Bell employee--express tentative interest but later decide not to join.

On other occasions, though, the unlikeliest prospects turn out to be excellent recruits. Presley has concluded it doesn’t pay to draw conclusions about young people based on a slovenly appearance or a dimwitted demeanor. Sometimes, he said, people that seem vacant turn out to be quite bright.

“I never look at first impressions,” he said, “unless they’re wearing two beepers on their pocket,” which is the signature of drug dealers.