ANALYSIS – Despite the mounting global threats to the United States, and the increasing potential for significant conflict between great powers, the Biden Pentagon can’t understand why it is facing its worst recruiting environment in decades.
It is time they look inward and see how their own leftist policies at the Department of Defense (DoD) are mainly to blame.
While obsessing over woke leftist causes and ‘diverse’ recruits not normally interested in military service, the Pentagon is alienating the vastly greater number of patriotic conservatives who normally fill our military ranks.
At the May 5 Army posture hearing with the Senate Committee on Armed Services, top military leaders sounded the alarm about recruitment. The Christina Post reports:
According to top DoD leadership, this is the most challenging recruiting year since the beginning of the all-volunteer force almost five decades ago. The Army announced that even after being forced to cut 12,000 soldiers, it still cannot fill its ranks. In addition to this, the percentage of young Americans qualified to join the Army is now at the lowest point ever at 23%.
While an increasingly obese, unfit, and mentally unhealthy society is partly to blame for fewer young Americans qualifying physically or mentally for service, the Pentagon itself is a big part of the recruitment problem.
Much of this crisis is caused by a growing lack of trust and confidence in the U.S. military. And much of this among its core recruiting pool – conservative patriotic young Americans.
Currently, only 11% of all those aged 16-21 answered “definitely or probably” in their likelihood to “serve in the military.”
According to a Reagan Institute survey, the percentage of Republican respondents saying, “they had a great deal of confidence in the military,” dropped dramatically from 87% in 2018 to “53% in 2021.”
And look no farther than the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, for a prime example of why this is happening.
The Post continues:
The loss of trust by many conservatives comes primarily from a perceived liberal bias at the top of DoD. Many conservative media sources have decried what appears to be DoD following “political” priorities of the Biden Administration, including perceived targeting of conservatives in uniform. The bias became so obvious that even traditionally liberal news sources have opined about the problem.
The Atlantic, a known liberal source, published the following: “Where (Milley) deserves greater criticism is his congressional testimony from a few weeks ago … he went on to connect racism to the attack on the Capitol: ‘I want to understand white rage … What is it that made thousands of people assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?’”
The “white rage” statement by General Milley infuriated conservatives, as it was perceived both as an endorsement of critical race theory and of partisan political narratives. The bias perception was compounded by Bob Woodward’s and Robert Costa’s book Peril quoting senior military and civilian DoD leaders with statements undermining Trump and showing partiality to Democrats.
If the Pentagon doesn’t quickly step back from its far left, woke policies and rampant Democrat-linked politicization, conservative Americans’ trust and confidence in the military will only continue to plummet.
And with it, the recruitment numbers for our nation’s fighting forces.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AmericanActionNews.com
