The Covid-vaccine mandate, declining physical fitness, and broader cultural shifts are creating a national-security threat, lawmakers told NR.
The numbers are unambiguous. Americans are less qualified for, interested in, and trusting of the military than they ever have been before, and the results are recruitment shortfalls with national-security implications.
To date, with only three months remaining in the fiscal year, the Army has met just 40 percent of its recruitment goal and is culling its active-duty force by 12,000 troops. The Air Force is 4,000 recruits behind its goal at this point in the year. The Navy may or may not meet its goals, but only because it’s sending fewer recruits through its Delayed Entry Program to prevent a shortfall.
In congressional testimony, Marine general David Ottignon called 2022 “arguably the most challenging recruiting year since the inception of the all-volunteer force.”
Retired Army lieutenant general Thomas Spoehr, who now serves as the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told National Review that the falling numbers represent a problem that’s much more serious than missing some arbitrary goal.
“Certain elements of the military are already struggling with shortages. The Air Force has been dealing with a pilot shortage now for years,” explained Spoehr. “There’s other career fields like cyber and medical where the military has a hard time getting the numbers they want. . . . The Navy doesn’t talk about it much, but they have a real challenge manning the ships that they need to put out to sea, and people are getting back-to-back sea tours.”
Spoehr said those kinds of demanding schedules could result in a “death spiral” that would drive more and more servicemen out.
“A smaller military, you just can’t make up for that with technology. We’re seeing that with the Russian army in Ukraine,” he said.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill agree. Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.) has been beating the drum on this issue since last fall.
“Our military may lose its capacity to meet its current requirements or respond to emergencies. Moreover, if we reduce the size of the services, then larger burdens fall on those who remain . . . creating even greater retention issues,” Johnson told National Review.
He believes that the problem is largely political.
“The Biden administration’s military Covid-19 vaccine mandate is a primary cause of recruitment problems, but it’s a symptom of a bigger issue: the politicization of our military,” said Johnson. “Potential recruits look at the Pentagon’s focus on social issues — while glaring errors are being made, such as the failed withdrawal in Afghanistan — and they are understandably left to wonder whether the priorities of the top brass are misplaced.”
Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) agreed with Johnson’s assertion that Covid-vaccine hesitancy and the politicization of the Pentagon are at least in part to blame for recruitment problems, but he also offered “skyrocketing rates of obesity and mental-health issues” and “an extremely tight labor market.”
Gallagher, the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel, said that “thus far the Pentagon has offered neither a compelling analysis of what is driving this phenomenon nor a coherent plan for fixing the problem before it gets worse.” He also critiqued military leaders for waiving the high-school-diploma requirement for enlistees, calling it “at best a temporary Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound and at worst a signal that we are willing to accept lower standards.”
As Gallagher noted, declining physical fitness among America’s young men and women is narrowing the pool of acceptable candidates. According to Army chief of staff General James McConville, just 23 percent of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 presently qualify to join up. And per a Department of Defense memo obtained by NBC News, just 9 percent of eligible young Americans “had any inclination” to do so.
According to Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), a veteran and member of the Armed Services Committee, “this signals the need for a change in training and recruitment programs for the next generation.”
Ernst touted her successful effort to commit resources in this year’s defense bill toward examining “current Department of Defense training and recruitment programs, and how they can be improved to increase eligible recruits.” Like Gallagher, however, she stressed the need not to emphasize quantity over quality by “sacrificing our combat readiness and fitness.”
Spoehr concurred that the military has become politicized in the eyes of the public, with progressives convinced that it’s a “breeding ground for racism and extremism” and conservatives who believe it’s been transformed into “a social experiment in woke-ism.” He said there’s “a grain of truth on both sides,” but that there’s not “much evidence that suggests there’s a major racism or extremism problem in the military,” besides the involvement of a few bad apples in the January 6 Capitol riot. Spoehr did criticize the top brass at the Pentagon for allowing themselves to be “drawn into” debates over topics such as critical race theory, calling those “missteps.”
More generally, Spoehr cited a “widening civil-military gap where the civilian world knows less and less about the military” and vice versa. That gap, no doubt widened in part by political controversies, is no theoretical chasm. A survey conducted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute found that just 45 percent of Americans placed a “great deal” of trust in the military, down from 70 percent in 2018.
“More and more civilians — young people — can tell you almost nothing about the military, what the branches are, and what the lifestyle is like,” argued Spoehr. “There was a survey the Army did that said that 51 percent of the young people believe that the Army provides no opportunity for recreation and hobbies. That all you do in the Army is just work.”
While politicians like Johnson have championed dropping the Covid-vaccine mandate as a partial fix — he noted that “in the southeastern United States, which contributes disproportionately to enlistments, over 50 percent of 18- to 24-year-old men are unvaccinated” — Spoehr was hesitant to endorse such a measure, offering that those unwilling to abide by the military’s requirements might not be well-suited to join it.
Instead, he called for leaders at the national level to make it a priority by working to get service members who “sell themselves” into schools, and finding other ways to help Americans understand that they have a “magnificent military.”
“There is no quick solution,” admitted Spoehr. This is a state, school district, county, city problem. We have to get inside of the key influence levels, and we haven’t done a good job of that.”
Gallagher raised the stakes of the issue, arguing that “if we cannot convince the best and the brightest to volunteer to serve and defend the greatest country in the history of the world, then we will lose our new cold war with Communist China.”