Young people are too fat and woke to fight
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The U.S. military has a problem. Nearly every branch is falling short of its recruitment goals. Some are starting to admit it’s more than a problem. It’s a full-blown crisis.
Last year, the U.S. Army fell 15,000 short of its onboarding target of 60,000. By May, the secretary of the Army was already telling Congress they were going to fall short again in 2023. Only the Space Force, which draws from a smaller and more selective applicant pool, is keeping pace with its hoped for recruitment numbers.
This has obvious national security implications. The fear is that standards will eventually be lowered intolerably to boost these numbers, or the American armed forces will simply be forced to go without.
The reasons behind this recruitment crisis are many. There is a war-weariness in the country after 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, both missions that were judged by large public majorities to be at least partial failures. Recruitment has been challenging ever since Vietnam, another unpopular military intervention that ended without achieving its main objective.
Casualties from these wars and greater awareness of afflictions like PTSD have had an impact on the willingness to sign up. One Defense Department survey reportedly concluded that nearly 60 percent of young people in the military’s recruitment target age range feared the mental health consequences of serving. Almost half thought they would develop physical challenges as a result.
The pandemic limited recruitment opportunities, as high schools and colleges were frequently closed for a year or two. The percentage of target age Americans who have parents who have been in the military has plummeted since the mid-1990s.
Finally, the talent pool is increasingly shallow. Obesity, drug use, criminality, and a general inability to meet the physical and intellectual standards for service are rampant. The U.S. Army chief of staff told Congress last year that just 23 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 are qualified to join the military without a waiver.
Combine the military suffering with the same drop in public confidence as other government institutions, albeit not as steep, and a population of young people who are ill prepared for military service, and you get a recruitment crisis.
These mostly external factors make it all the more unconscionable that military leaders are adding self-inflicted wounds to the mix: adopting some of the “woke” concepts that have infected academia and corporate HR departments across the United States.
This further repels the conservative, disproportionately Southern demographic on which the military relies for new recruits.
While Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said it was “spurious” to suggest the armed forces taught or subscribed to critical race theory, for example, a top military leader defended the idea in congressional testimony in 2021.
“I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “So what is wrong with understanding – having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”
But Mao, Marx, and Lenin were read by American military leaders to understand the thinking of an enemy from which they were supposed to defend the United States. They were not read as a way of understanding political economy or American society on communist terms.
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” Milley said. “So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”
By that logic, Milley should read QAnon or white nationalist literature rather than Ibram X. Kendi if he is attempting to understand an ideological foe – and genuine racism without question has no place in the military – in its own terms.
In suggesting critical race theory is a way to “understand white rage,” Milley is accepting CRT as descriptive of reality, not something that simply must be understood intellectually to be refuted or even just academically well rounded.
Milley is known to dislike the theory that “wokeness” deters recruitment and retention. So is President Joe Biden.
Last month Biden denounced “those voices slandering the American military, saying it’s becoming weak, soft and less capable.” In defending his DEI emphasis, he denied the armed services have been “emasculated.”
But military service is likely to be most desirable to those who believe the country is worth defending. One would not read Marx, or descendants of Marxism like critical race theory, to acquire or reinforce that belief about the United States.
With so many problems in American society working against the all-volunteer military, the institution cannot afford to take friendly fire.
