The Air Force will start 2026’s annual recruiting cycle with a record-high number of potential recruits in the service’s delayed entry program. If all of the recruits currently in the pre-service program eventually report for boot camp, the service would be more than halfway toward next year’s goal, service officials told Task & Purpose.

Currently, about 19,000 people are in the Air Force’s delayed entry program, which allows potential trainees to wait up to four months before shipping to basic military training, Air Force officials said. That is the highest number of people in the program since the Air Force began keeping records on it in 2012, said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey W. Nelson, commander of the Air Force Accessions Center and the Air Force Recruiting Service at Joint Base San Antonio in

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