It’s well-known among U.S. Army recruiters: A bad economy is good for recruiting.

That’s what’s going on right now.

As the U.S. struggles through perhaps the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression, recruiting data show that civilians are nearly banging down the door to get in.

"If you were to join the Army now, you could not ship," because the training slots are already filled, said Sgt. 1st Class David W. Bucklin, station commander for the U.S. Army recruiting station on Pulaski Barracks in Kaiserslautern, Germany.

In other words, the Army has more recruits than it can handle.

By mid-October, Bucklin was already looking to November to find training slots for potential recruits, he said.

Such a run to serve is not unusual or unexpected.

During the last economic downturn, which encompassed most of 2002 and 2003, new recruits had to wait up to five months to leave for initial-entry training because training seats — either in boot camp or at job-specific schools soldiers attend after basic — were already full, according to Bucklin.

They weren’t all coming in for the money, but during an economic downturn, when jobs are scarce and wages stagnate, the money, benefits and stability become bigger factors — if not the biggest — in a person’s decision to sign up.

"I’m coming in because I just can’t find a job, the economy’s in decline and no one’s hiring," is a line recruiters have been hearing in recent months, Bucklin said.

And that’s pretty much the case right now stateside.

The U.S. economy has lost 760,000 jobs so far this year. In September, U.S. employers took 2,269 mass layoff actions — the highest since September 2001, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — giving 235,681 workers pink slips.

As Sgt. Maj. of the Army Kenneth Preston toured Europe last week discussing the Army’s continued expansion, the outlook for civilian employment soured further.

Economists expect more than 200,000 more jobs will be slashed in October, the New York Times reported Saturday, but that data won’t be available until after the election. Right now, the U.S. unemployment rate sits at 6.1 percent.

But Army recruiting is humming along.

The Albany, N.Y., Recruiting Battalion is the Army’s most diverse. It handles enlistments for 27 New York counties, five counties in Massachusetts, the states of Vermont and Connecticut, and the two northernmost counties in New Jersey, as well as all of Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. It also covers a region not known for producing large volumes of military recruits, Bucklin said, so when the Albany battalion is doing well, it’s pretty much a given that other recruiting battalions are doing well.

And the Albany battalion is doing very well — even compared to two months ago.

Since the end of August, the battalion’s enlistments have picked up by 20 percent, Bucklin said, but he declined to give exact numbers because he was not authorized to release that information.

"We have a lot of people calling in about the bonuses," Bucklin said.

Depending on the number of years a recruit commits to, the job they choose and how quickly they can ship to basic training, bonuses for Army Reserve enlistees can go as high as $20,000, and active-duty bonuses as high as $40,000, Bucklin said. Re-enlistment bonuses for the Army go as high as $90,000.

Following 9/11, some joined the military because they wanted to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, said Sgt. Bradly Bitker, of 2nd Infantry Division headquarters in South Korea. Now, "They’re joining to survive during a recession," he said.

"I think you’re going to have a lot of people join the military who never would have thought about it before."