The army is responding in part by increasing the percentage of prospective recruits with low scores on aptitude tests who qualify for service, officials said.

The army also wants to offer big increases in enlistment incentives, including signing bonuses of up of 40,000 dollars, they said.

"It does have an impact," General Richard Cody, the army's vice chief of staff, said of the recruiting shortfall.

Cody said the army ended the 2005 fiscal year September 30 with a little more than 73,000 new recruits, well short of its goal of 80,000.

He said the shortfall means that the army will not be able to increase in size to 502,000 as planned, and instead will lag at around 493,000 to 494,000.

The increase was supposed to give the army a cushion as it builds 10 new combat brigades and increases the size of its combat force by at least 30,000 troops from 315,000 today.

Cody told reporters that even with the recruiting shortfall, the army remains on track to build those new brigades.

But he said it will require moving more solders from the army bureaucracy into combat units, something that he said needed to be done anyway.

"There are many things to deal with this endstrength issue," he said. "One of them is to rebalance what we have in the institutional army and continue to move military spaces and faces from that into the operational army."

Army Secretary Frances Harvey told reporters at a separate press conference that plans call for moving 40,000 soldiers from slots in the army bureaucracy or service schools to operational units by 2007.

On recruiting, Harvey said the army has decided to adopt Defense Department qualification standards that are less demanding than those followed by the army.

"We made a decision that those standards (DoD's) have a lot more basis in the reason and the quality than our standards," Harvey said.

The army required that 67 percent of its new recruits score in the top 50 percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, while the Defense Department set a lower 60 percent level for the services as a whole.

The DoD standards would double from two to four percent the recruits that could be accepted with test scores in the lowest 30 percentile.

"The truth of the matter is, we opened up the aperture and said, 'Okay, we can declare success as long as we stay above or at what DoD's goal was,'" Cody said, using the acronym for the Department of Defense.

"That's to afford the recruiters out there a wider aperture to go after," he said.

Cody said the army met its goals for quality this year, and he insisted that remains a top priority.

"We are not going to lower our standards," he said. "We have a certain percentage that we will not go below for non-high school diplomas. We closed out the year meeting all the floors we wanted to meet in terms of quality."

Next year, however, the army is likely to face as great or greater recruiting difficulties than this year.

Harvey said the army is seeking spending authority to make big increases in incentives for prospective recruits to sign up.

They include doubling the current signing bonus from 20,000 dollars to up to 40,000; a 2,500-dollar finder fee offered to any soldier who persuades a buddy to join the army; and 25,000 dollars tax free toward the purchase of a home at the end of a four year enlistment.

Cody noted that despite its recruitment woes, the army exceeded its retention goals by eight percent even though some soldiers are on their third tour of duty in Iraq.

"It tells me those soldiers who come in and those soldiers who have served, stay with us," he said.

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