Marine recruiters have long faced some of the most challenging workplace conditions of all military recruiters, the Pentagon’s own surveys show. A Business Insider investigation reveals the pressure to find enlistees hasn’t been limited to rank-and-file recruiters; it has also taken a toll on higher-ups, contributing to a raft of firings and allegations of abusive work conditions.
Interviews and Marine Corps investigation documents exclusively obtained by Business Insider detail how two colonels lost their leadership posts during the pandemic era. Two others were also fired — one who was removed from her job spoke about the stress she experienced.
“It was overwhelming,” retired Marine Corps Col. Heather Cotoia said. “It’s the burden of command. You’re responsible for everything your Marines do or fail to do.”
Cotoia said she was officially relieved, or fired, over her “leadership” and was never given an explanation of what that meant. Representatives for the Marine Corps declined to provide details, citing privacy concerns.
Two other colonels in a neighboring district were also relieved between 2021 and 2023, according to Marine Corps investigation documents. In a typical year, only a handful of colonels across the force are relieved, making the concentration among recruiters highly unusual.
The documents and interviews reveal pockets of a system that were pushed to the edge during the pandemic, when already steep recruiting goals collided with school closures, new medical-screening hurdles, and shrinking pools of young Americans eligible for service. As the pressure escalated, the military found, some commanders resorted to intimidation and rule-breaking.
According to one investigative report, a commander relieved in 2023 said that recruiters needed to hit the streets like “French whores” to meet their quota of two sign-ups a month.
In another case, a commander relieved in 2021 encouraged subordinates to send applicants to medical processing even if they had recently failed the Corps’ in-office drug test.
“If they’re hot, bring them down anyway,” the commander, whose name was redacted in the documents, allegedly said to subordinates, referring to positive drug tests.
“Get them all on the schedule,” he was quoted as saying. “This is about mission. We have to make the mission.”
Marine investigations find problematic leadership and ‘brow-beaten’ recruiters
The Marine investigations into the two colonels, who each oversaw regional operations in the Midwest, were detailed in two Marine Corps Inspector General reports obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Following the probes, both colonels were relieved.
In the 2021 case, the commander’s order to process applicants who failed drug tests provoked a moral crisis among subordinates who felt it violated the Corps’ recruiting rules, the documents said.
One subordinate alleged the commander called the officers under him “disgruntled temporary workers.” Another spoke of intimidating phone calls in which the colonel told subordinates that they could not afford to fail in recruiting. Others were “brow-beaten,” verbally berated, psychologically abused, and threatened with being fired if they couldn’t find enough new recruits, the report and witness statements say.
In 2023, a second colonel — the one who allegedly made the remark about “French whores” — was relieved after being found by an investigating officer to have berated subordinates. Multiple witnesses expressed an omnipresent sense of dread and said the climate was oppressive, driving some to consider leaving the service entirely.
This story is part of a Business Insider investigation into Marine recruiter welfare. Read the first installments:
- Inside the hidden Marine Corps recruiting crisis that’s ‘burning Marines’ to fill the ranks
- Fake records and forged signatures: Marines say recruiting pressure fueled a culture of fraud
Stay tuned for part four:
- The military is running out of teenagers to recruit — and old-school methods to reach them are failing
The report issued by a general noted that the colonel was under the gun. His region, the Midwest, had “failed to accomplish its assigned recruiting mission for over a year,” the general said. At least two subordinate officers leading Midwest recruiting hubs were fired in the six months preceding the new colonel’s arrival. The region’s recruiters “lacked confidence, were prone to excuses, and had developed a ‘woe is me mindset,'” the general said.
The Corps told Business Insider that it does not tolerate abusive leadership.
“Allegations of misconduct or inappropriate command climate are investigated,” a spokesperson said. “When violations are substantiated, the Marine Corps takes corrective action that best supports Marines, mission, and command now and into the future.”
Over-missioned and under-supplied
Some leader firings didn’t come with accusations of misconduct.
Cotoia said one of her subordinates — a previous recipient of a top leadership award — was relieved for failure to recruit. One of her deputies also lost his job, with little explanation provided, she said.
The Midwest and Rust Belt, where the leadership firings were concentrated, face heightened recruiting pressure, according to recruiters and the investigation documents. The regions have few major bases where young Americans encounter troops in day-to-day life, meaning fewer chances to spark interest in service simply by proximity to military life. Even before the pandemic, the region’s big cities weren’t producing recruits at the level of those on the coasts or in the South, sources said.
“The problem was they were expecting the same effort from recruiters in different markets to have the same outcome,” said a longtime current recruiting official.
Recruiters in those regions were “over-missioned,” the official said— tasked with finding too many recruits from too few prospects, despite the Marine Corps’ painstaking efforts to allocate recruiters properly. Every missed goal invited more scrutiny from above, they said.
The pandemic ratcheted up recruiting pressures across all military services. High schools went virtual, cutting off a primary access point, and community events vanished. Then in 2022, a new medical-screening system known as Genesis caused processing delays by flagging minor issues in many recruits’ medical histories. (The military has since improved the system, a spokesman said, acknowledging “early implementation contributed to delays and uncertainty at a time when the recruiting environment was already under extraordinary pressure.”)
Business Insider is reporting on how recruiting practices and policies are evolving across the US military. If you have insight into current challenges, emerging trends, or future-focused initiatives, we’d like to hear from you. Reach this reporter securely on Signal at kelseybaker75.75 or by email at [email protected].
One officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Business Insider he logged workweeks of 80-plus hours in 2021, and estimated that some enlisted Marines had hit 100-hour weeks dialing hundreds of phone numbers, scouring social media for local high schoolers, and meeting with hesitant parents to promote the benefits of enlistment. A second officer said that within his first three months on the job, his focus shifted away from recruiting and toward “saving the Marines,” referring to their well-being.
When asked about such extreme work hours reported by some recruiters, the Marine Corps said 2024 recruiter welfare surveys show a small decrease in the number of recruiters who report working over 60 hours weekly since 2022, down from 91% to 82% of recruiters. “While long work hours remain a challenge, this decrease demonstrates progress in alleviating the workload,” a spokesperson said. The Corps did not share full copies of the survey.
A late reckoning
The longtime recruiting official told Business Insider that officer reliefs slowed after then-Major Gen. William Bowers took command in 2022 and oversaw an external study on shifting demographics of potential recruits. Such surveys are designed to give recruiting leaders an early read on population shifts and how willingness to serve varies across different communities.
The pandemic “placed a level of strain on the recruiting enterprise that was unlike anything we’ve experienced in the past,” a Marine Corps Recruiting Command spokesman acknowledged to Business Insider. Recruiters, and those in charge of them, were up against “extraordinary pressure” and facing “extreme conditions felt across the entire recruiting enterprise.”
Recruiting across the military has recently been on the uptick. New Pentagon figures show a strong start to fiscal year 2026, boosted by Army and Navy pre-boot camp preparatory courses that help low-scoring or overweight applicants increase scores and fitness to meet military standards. And some regions for the Marine Corps are thriving, the recruiting official said.
“I think we’ve turned the corner, and production is way up,” he said of recruiting across the country, though the Midwest and Rust Belt lag behind other regions.
Cotoia is cautiously optimistic about the future of recruiting too. A recent restructuring for the Corps has pushed more recruiters into the growing southern US.
She worries that certain challenges will persist, however, such as reaching young people who live mostly online.
“It’s easy to get stuck in a mindset of, ‘we have a formula, and it’s worked for so many years,'” Cotoia said. Some may wonder why change is needed when things seem to be going well. The answer, she said, is that the system is “breaking at the cost of people, and of good people.”
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