Operation Ring the Bell
execution to date
In roughly seven months, a volunteer effort with no funding line and no tasking authority executed 124 drives across 18 installations and registered 9,460 service members — against an Army baseline of about 1,000 a year. 55% of that came from initial-entry and institutional training posts, which is where the leverage already is. Units running drives themselves produced only 13% of the total, from two installations. The constraint is not capability or willingness. It is that nobody has been told to do it.
What the year actually looked like.
Cumulative registrations, January – August 2025
The program cleared 6,724 dated registrations in seven months. The slope from March to May is what a tasked, running program looks like.
What this curve covers: 6,724 of the year's 9,460 registrations, being the ones reported with a date attached. A further 2,736 across 7 rows — the Fort Knox cadet-training block — were reported as a block total rather than by date, so they can't be placed on a timeline. They are counted in every total on this page.
Monthly tempo, and who ran the drives
Unit-led drives don't appear at all until April. Everything before that is volunteers doing it on their own time.
The leverage is already visible.
Where 2025 actually came from
All 124 drives by installation. Training posts carried 5,185 of 9,460 registrations — 55% of the year.
Which way of running a drive produces the volume
Total registrations by method, with the average per event beside it. Mass formations produced 49% of the entire year across 32 events.
The nuance worth keeping: tabling averages the highest per event (174), but only across eight events — and the big ones were a church service, a blood drive, and a minor-league ball game. Those spike, and they are not repeatable on a training calendar. Mass formation is the channel that is both high-yield and schedulable, which is why it produced nearly half the year.
Unit-led drives work. Two posts have run them.
92 drives · 18 installations
Soldiers doing this around their actual jobs, on their own time, at their own expense of effort.
32 drives · 2 installations
Fort Bliss and Fort Hood. That is the entire list of units that have ever run this themselves.
Read those two columns together and the whole argument is there. Where units were asked, it worked without ORTB present. It has been asked at two installations out of every post in the Army. The gap between 1,190 and 8,270 is not a capability problem — it is an unissued tasking.
What the data supports asking for.
55% of output already comes from training posts with a fraction of the drives. Put the brief in initial-entry and institutional programs of instruction.
Two installations have run it themselves and it worked. Every additional post that does is upside that costs the Army nothing.
144 per event across 32 events, versus 26 at a reception desk. It is the only channel that is both high-yield and schedulable.
A program this size outgrows the spreadsheet it started in. Central intake — date, post, method, on every drive — means the next 9,460 arrive ready to brief.