What’s Behind the Military Recruiting Crisis?

What’s happening: The U.S. military will enter 2024 with the smallest number of active-duty troops since 1941, due to a severe and systemic inability to recruit new soldiers. All three main branches — Army, Navy, and Air Force — failed to meet their recruiting goals, although the Marine Corps and Space Force both managed to hit their targets.

A complicated problem: There are several causes for the military’s recruitment crisis. Here are a few that military analysts point to:

• A declining number of Americans are eligible for the military due to young people’s high rates of both physical and mental health problems.

• Gen Z generally has low trust in institutions, including the military, making them less receptive to recruitment messaging.

• Fewer young people have family connections to the military. In 1995, 40 percent of young Americans had a parent who had served. By 2022, that number had fallen to just 12 percent.

The elephant in the room: Now-retired Gen. Mark Milley has also admitted that perceived “wokeness” in the military under President Joe Biden is a “contributing factor” to recruitment struggles. It’s difficult to measure its effects in empirical terms.

A new approach? Conservatives noted that a new Army recruiting ad released last month featured almost exclusively young white men. The ad was strikingly different from the Pentagon’s flood of left-wing “diversity” messaging over the last decade. This suggests that behind closed doors, the military brass might be more worried about its woke reputation than it wants to let on.