Military Recruitment Challenges Show American Leadership Failures

A new Wall Street Journal article about the difficulty the US military is running into trying to convince young people to enlist hits on many of the themes that I’ve written about in my newsletter. It’s an interesting encapsulation of American elite failure.

The problem is that most of the services are falling far short of their recruitment goals - as much as 25% short:

The U.S. Army in 2022 had its toughest recruiting year since the advent of the all-volunteer military in 1973 and missed its goal by 25%. This year, it expects to end up about 15,000 short of its target of 65,000 recruits.

The Navy expects to fall short by as many as 10,000 of its goal of nearly 38,000 recruits this year, and the Air Force has said it is anticipating coming in at 3,000 below its goal of nearly 27,000. The Marine Corps met its target last year of sending 33,000 to boot camp, and expects to meet its goals this year, but its leaders described recruitment as challenging.

Why is that?

Degrading America’s Human Capital

The factors the Journal identifies as contributing to this shortfall have implications extending far beyond the military. For example, 77% of young people in America are ineligible to serve in the military. So the military can only recruit from a pool of less than a quarter of the country’s military age population.

The Department of Defense said 77% of American youth are disqualified from military service due to a lack of physical fitness, low test scores, criminal records including drug use or other problems. In 2013, about 71% of youth were ineligible. 

The Army estimates that pandemic pressures on education including remote learning, illness, lack of internet access and social isolation lowered scores on the ASVAB, the military’s standardized test for potential recruits, by as much as 9%. Those who score below a certain level on the test and on physical readiness tests can’t join without improving their scores. 

As we see, the share of the population eligible to serve is not only low but has been declining.

In a famous book of the same title, economist Julian Simon referred to human beings as “the ultimate resource.” The wealth of a nation is ultimately not in its natural resources but its human resources. A nation’s most important asset is its people.

A country with wise leadership would recognize this and work hard to build up its people, to invest in them so they can thrive. This is something that the modern American conservative often fails to appreciate. Working to improve the citizenry is generally viewed as a leftist endeavor, typically a futile one. But in the past, conservatives as well as liberals understood the need to invest in developing the potentialities of our people. This involved everything from the rise of modern sanitation to the high school movement. In the postwar era, the G.I. Bill continued this move towards elevating our people through education.

Today, our leaders have presided over the degradation of our youth. Drug addiction, obesity, mental illness, criminality, and more have combined become so prevalent that almost 80% of young people are not even eligible for military service. If they can’t even enlist in the Army, this suggests they have major problems that will have a big effect on their ability to flourish in life.

It’s always been the case that people have bemoaned the supposed decline of the youth. But in this case, we see through a hard measure by a motivated institution, namely our military, that there are objective, quantifiable problems that need to be addressed.

A serious country would working to address these very serious problems. Instead, dating back probably to the 1980s, our leaders broke the social contract and gave up on the American people.

In particular, globalization broke the link that previously bound the American elite and workers together. What was good for General Motors was good for America and vice versa. In that era, American companies could only make money if the American consumer could buy their products. They also had to employ American workers to make their product, meaning the quality of the American labor force was a key concern.

Today, companies like Apple make money globally, and can take a portfolio approach to markets. They no longer require American workers to build their products, only design them. For those companies that still have key operations here, they turned to globally sourcing labor through immigration - legal and illegal - to reduce their dependence on the American worker as well.

Thus America’s leaders could afford to be indifferent to serious problems like family breakdown, rising obesity, or opioids because they weren’t dependent on the people whose lives were affected by them.

But the military is one institution that actually still needs in shape, mentally stable, skilled Americans to fight its wars. In the alarming state of its recruiting pool, we see what America’s leaders have been doing to the people of this country.

Reversing the degradation of our people is a critical priority for our country, and is one reason why in my major essay on Republican failures in the state of Indiana, I listed as my number one idea for the state that it should invest in the well-being of the state’s people.

A state’s wealth is ultimately in its people, but Indiana has long lagged in investing in its citizens. Undoubtedly, the character of the state is less friendly to this sentiment than that of many other states. Indiana has long had a Jacksonian, small-l libertarian cultural streak, and is famously slow to change the status quo. A fear of government overreach surely played a role in Indiana being a laggard mandating school attendance more than a century ago. But the larger conservative movement has also worked hard to delegitimize the very idea that Republican voters should expect their elected officials to do anything for them personally…Values like thrift and hard work are permanent, but a mentality of pure self-reliance or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is anachronistic for most people in the twenty-first century. America today is a postbourgeois society in which most citizens are dependent on and largely at the mercy of powerful, impersonal forces and institutions they can neither fully understand nor control…While these situations call for humility and prudence, Republicans must see it as part of their job to help their people build a life in the face of these headwinds.

Relying on an Ever Narrower Base of Talent

With the end of the draft and the coming of an all-volunteer military, the services had to offer benefits in order to entice people to sign up. But rather than working hard to encourage broad participation in the service, our military became increasingly dependent on what has developed into a de facto military caste. People who serve overwhelmingly come from families of those who served, and a limited set of geographies.

When the draft ended at the close of the Vietnam War, the military fostered recruitment with the promise of a good career with retirement benefits and healthcare, as well as education benefits to prepare soldiers for life after the military. That strategy worked, and the Army typically met its overall needs. 

It did so by relying heavily on veterans and military families to develop the next generation of recruits, especially in the region known in the military as the “Southern Smile,” a curving region from the mid-Atlantic and down across the southern U.S.

Today, nearly 80% of all new Army recruits have a family member who has served in uniform, according to the service. That can be a good thing, said Col. Mark Crow, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, because “people who know the most about it stick around.” Depending too much on military families could create a “warrior caste,” [Army Secretary Christine] Wormuth said.

In other words, our military took the easy way out by relying on a narrow talent base. Now they are paying the price. Undoubtedly our society has been taking the easy way out in other ways as well.

Centering Ideology

Like the other institutions of society, the US military has decided to become an ideology-led organization, particularly around DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). The diversity push isn’t all bad. As I noted above, the military has become very dependent on a narrow talent base. It has to broaden its appeal beyond that.

At the same time, rather than working to expand the appeal of the service, our military has become actively hostile to its core demographic in how it presents itself. In particular, while the military as a whole is very diverse, the combat arms - the people who do the actual fighting - remain very heavily made up of white men. Being from the “southern smile,” they skew conservative. Embracing left-coded ideologies only turns this group off. The net result is that those military families are now telling their kids not to go into the service.

The children of military families make up the majority of new recruits in the U.S. military. That pipeline is now under threat, which is bad news for the Pentagon’s already acute recruitment problems, as well as America’s military readiness.  

“Influencers are not telling them to go into the military,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview. “Moms and dads, uncles, coaches and pastors don’t see it as a good choice.”

After the patriotic boost to recruiting that followed 9/11, the U.S. military has endured 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no decisive victories, scandals over shoddy military housing and healthcare, poor pay for lower ranks that forces many military families to turn to food stamps, and rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide. 

As this excerpt notes, military families turning against the service involves many factors and isn’t just a white conservative issue. But centering left ideology can’t be helping. For example, the Army’s marketing department just put out a story that went viral on twitter about an out of shape, balding, obviously male transgendered soldier who found “her true self.” Even in an institution that wants to accept transgendered soldiers, it’s not clear why it would center stories like this in its marketing. Given the small number of transgendered people who could plausibly be recruited to the military, the point is clearly not recruitment but rather signaling to civilian society that the military too affirms the same elite value set as corporate America, etc. But the military recruits from a very different demographic base than Fortune 500 companies, universities, or foundations. Their core demographics have different values, and this type of marketing basically amounts to a poke in the eye to them. This certainly can’t be helping with recruitment and is simply another example of how to the American elite, “inclusion” actually means exclusion.

It would, candidly, be entirely rational for conservative families to tell their children not to enlist in the current ideological climate. Particularly for the young white male, who is the bête noire of our elite today, it’s not clear why he would want to sign up to get killed or maimed to advance the agenda of those who think he’s the problem in our society.

Conservatives have very little leverage in American society today, but the one area where the country is still critically dependent on “deplorable” human capital is military combat arms. Refusing to serve is one of the only mechanisms conservatives have to hit the system where it hurts. A steep decline into enlistment into combat arms is one of the few things that could plausibly cause our leaders to ease off on ideology. But for now, they’ve been working to aggressively center ideology even as it has a negative effect on recruitment.

If you are able to access it through the paywall, I recommend reading the entire article. What’s happening in military recruitment is a symptom of a bigger trend of America’s leaders degrading our human capital, taking the easy way out rather than addressing problems, and making left ideology a central organizing feature of how they operate.