This Tenafly Marine wants to improve military recruiting for Gen Z. Will top brass adapt?

Matthew Weiss always thought of himself as patriotic during his boyhood in Tenafly, New Jersey.

His bar mitzvah even featured what he deftly describes as a “presidential theme” and his own “roaring 15-minute speech.”

Now Weiss wants to save the American military. He’s 25, a newly minted second lieutenant in the U.S. Marines. Rescuing the military he just joined is not the path young officers usually follow. And that's what makes Matthew Weiss so unusual.

Weiss, who chucked his six-figure salary and a budding career with a defense contractor after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, enlisted in the Marines just two years ago. Holed up in a barracks on weekends, with plenty of spare time and a laptop during his nearly year-long training, Weiss has now written a book, distributed by a small California publisher, suggesting how the Pentagon can fix the recruiting problems with his own Generation Z.

“I understand my generation,” he said, speaking by phone with NorthJersey.com from a base in Australia where his Marine unit is deployed until the end of the year. “I was just recruited.  I felt compelled that this was the time to write.”

Most books about reforming the military are produced by retired generals or other high-ranking officers at the end of their careers. Ulysses S. Grant set the standard with his best-selling, two-volume autobiography published after his death in 1885. Then came Dwight Eisenhower’s memoirs after World War II. And Norman Schwarzkopf’s in the 1990s. And plenty of others in between to stock many a bookshelf.

As a lowly second lieutenant who had just completed the Marines’ grueling Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, Weiss knew well that he was bucking that trend. His new book, “We Don’t Want You, Uncle Sam:  Examining The Military Recruiting Crisis with Generation Z,” is not so much a personal memoir as a strident message for the Pentagon and, indeed, Congress and the president as America’s commander in chief. Or as Weiss notes in the book’s introduction: “The current status of military recruiting in the United States is terrifyingly grim.”

Nagging recruitment gaps trouble each service branch

Weiss is not exaggerating. To maintain its current level of 1.3 million active duty members across its six service branches, the Pentagon needs to bring in roughly 150,000 new recruits each year. So far this year, the Marines and the Space Force seem to be on track. But the Army and Air Force are each facing gaps this year of 10,000 recruits while the Navy may fall short by as many as 6,000 new members.

As a result the Pentagon announced that it was facing its worst recruiting crisis since the waning days of the Vietnam War, more than half-a-century ago.

Reasons for the downturn vary. Some defense analysts point to the COVID-19 pandemic, which set back campus recruiting and shuttered many storefront recruiting stations for portions of two years. Other problems range from the military’s image problems, brought on by intense criticism from conservatives that the military was “too woke” and from liberals that America is fighting too many wars and attracts too many right-wingers.

Yet another problem is Generation Z itself. A variety of military experts estimate that between 24% and a whopping 44% of Generation Z — those between 16 and 24 years old — can’t even meet basic standards of enlistment. The problems range from too many prospective recruits failing physical fitness tests because they are obese to not graduating from high school and having been arrested for drug use. Yet another unique problem is that too many Generation Z-ers have tattoos that cannot be hidden by a uniform. 

Weiss does not discount how these problems have taken a toll on recruiting. But his analysis probes even deeper into what he perceives as Generation Z’s atypical difficulties.

“The three key gaps are knowledge, trust and identity,” he said, adding that he feels “the military is suffering from a perception issue” with the very generation it is trying to recruit.

With only 1% of America’s population serving, Gen Z knows fewer veterans, Weiss said.

“Knowing what life is like in the military is rare,” he said.

“For trust, Z grew up with iPhones in hand and can sniff out marketing or incorrect information in a second,” Weiss noted. “We demand transparency from our institutions and Z has a lack of trust for many of them.”

Finally, says Weiss, “For identity, Z struggles to picture themselves in uniform. Does a life in the military actually appeal to their individual desires? They struggle to identify it.”

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Why shouldn't he speak up?

It’s rare to see a young officer step out like this while still on active duty – or, to underscore how uncommon Weiss' book is, just starting his military career.

As the Pentagon’s overall recruiting woes surfaced, Weiss noticed that only generals and admirals were speaking about the problem on TV.

Weiss thought: Why shouldn’t he speak up, too?

“I wanted to be a voice for my generation,” he said in the telephone interview from Australia, where he is serving as an intelligence officer with a unit deployed there from the California-based First Marine Division. “I didn’t want only a general or an admiral giving voice. I wanted someone from Gen Z talking.”

What’s more, Weiss noted: “I was just recruited. I understand much better my generation.”

Weiss, however, calls himself “an atypical recruit.” His grandfather, Leonard Weiss, joined the Marines at 17 and served as a tail gunner aboard a Dauntless dive bomber on 70 missions in the Pacific Theater during World War II. But otherwise, he does not come from a family with a long line of military veterans.  His father, Peter, is a commercial real estate developer; his mother, Louise, a stay-at-home mom who raised four children.

In high school, Weiss thought of applying to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, or another service academy. But he took a much more accepted route for someone raised in the high-powered, success-focused atmosphere of Tenafly where many students are pushed to gain high-salaried civilian jobs. He went to an Ivy League college — the University of Pennsylvania.

Then, armed with a coveted masters degree in business administration — an MBA — he took a high-salaried corporate job.

But something was lacking. Yes, the big salary was nice. And his future seemed solid. But Weiss wanted something more. So he signed up with the Marines — enlisting at a recruiting office in downtown Philadelphia.

Soon he began to wonder why more members of his generation were not looking to the military as a career.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic and its own problems for recruiting.

“COVID shook the core of the generation,” Weiss said in the interview. “It showed us the world doesn’t always operate as we thought and there is real danger out there. It made us more isolated, more pragmatic, and more depressed.”

Meanwhile, Weiss noticed that “the military retreated from society even more, which pushed us into the worst recruiting crisis we’ve ever had.”

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Can Weiss' proposals work?

To enhance recruiting, especially for Generation Z-ers, Weiss' book offers several forward-thinking proposals.

He suggests, for example, turning to “non-traditional outlets like influencers to reach Zoomers.” He also thinks the Pentagon should take the next step of instituting such reforms as a much wider college degree program for service members, an easing of what Weiss calls “ridiculous” medical standards that block some recruits who take some prescription drugs for chronic problems and an offer of performance bonuses to some service members.

In addition, he recommends more lenient leave policies and more reliance on remote work. And starting long before teenagers reach recruiting age, Weiss calls for schools to teach “real warrior capability in gym class” that would consist of “self-defense courses and basic boxing, wrestling, and defense techniques.” This could also include what Weiss calls “mental resilience training” that focuses on “accomplishing hard things in nature outdoors” —all in an effort to build a “stronger mindset” for Gen Z-ers.

Can it work?

What makes Weiss’ book provocative — perhaps even courageous — is that it has the potential to provoke a conversation in a military that is often handcuffed to age-old traditions that may have worked well in another century but not now.

Ultimately, however, the change in the military won’t just come from the Pentagon.

“In the end,” Weiss writes, “it is up to the young Americans themselves who comprise generation Z, to make a decision about serving in the military.”

Weiss made that decision.

Many of his friends from the prestigious Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania now work on Wall Street and command salaries far above his.

But the Marines, he said, offers him the “greatest leadership factory.”

“My friends are doing great,” Weiss said. “But in terms of leadership, this is the best place.”

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed non-fiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in the Northeast, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Gen Z military recruitment: Tenafly NJ Marine has some ideas