The Army kicked off a first-of-its-kind recruitment promotion on Monday, this time targeting high-achieving college graduates to fill vacancies in the service’s officer corps, according to a report in The New York Times.

With the economy stuggling, the Army has had little trouble in recent years filling its enlisted ranks with recruits, but it has lacked the officers to lead them, the Times wrote.

The campaign centers around four television commercials highlighting the Army’s stance that the new realities of warfare call for a modern leader.

"It’s a tough environment out there," Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, head of the Army Accessions Command, which oversees recruiting, told the Times. "It’s no longer where the enemy lines up on one side of the field and the coalition lines up on the other side and the referee blows the whistle. It’s a very complicated battlefield to figure out, and there are no referees.

"It is a different era, and it requires a different kind of thinker."

One ad, the Times notes, shows the pictures of famous generals including George Washington, Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell, while a voice-over says, "Officers in the U.S. Army can rise to any challenge. Can you?"

Two more tell the stories of corporate executives — Joseph DePinto, chief executive of 7-Eleven; and Otto Padron, a senior vice president at Univision — who previously served as Army officers. The final commercial is a more traditional approach, in which an officer explains his decision to join the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

"If you think about it as brand or product management, we have this product within our brand that gets no notoriety," Freakley told the Times. "For those who just graduated college, now is the time to become aware they can come to officer candidate school. We think the timing is right to get the notion out."