America’s Military Is Facing a Historic Recruiting Crisis and Pete Hegseth Knows Exactly What’s Causing It

(The Daily Signal)—A focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion has damaged the effectiveness of the U.S. military and hurt recruitment numbers.

Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, on Tuesday. One exchange in particular highlighted the wrongheaded thinking that infects some in the current U.S. leadership and how it addresses the military’s challenges.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the panel, said in hostile questioning of Hegseth that the military is “more diverse than it has ever been” and that it is more lethal.

Sen. Jack Reed claims that the military is more lethal than ever because it's more diverse than ever pic.twitter.com/RgyItLVOtC

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 14, 2025

The military may be more “diverse” than it has ever been. However, it’s also getting smaller and faces severe readiness challenges.

As Vice President-elect JD Vance noted on X during the questioning, the military has suffered through an ongoing recruitment crisis.

I find this grandstanding from Senate Democrats over the Hegseth confirmation perplexing.

We haven't won a war in three decades and we have a major recruitment challenge.

Hegseth is assuredly NOT more of the same, and that's good!

— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 14, 2025

The Pentagon, especially under the Biden administration, has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority for the military. The justification was that to bring in new people, the military needed to “look like” the country.

Alex Wagner, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, explained the administration’s reasoning at a 2023 House Armed Services Committee Hearing.

“Intentional diversity and inclusion efforts allow us to tap into the full talents of the American people and then leverage those talents to defend the nation,” Wagner said.

He said that the focus on DEI was “informed by science and business best practices, congressional mandates, data-focused policy reviews and assessments.”

The most prominent pro-DEI business study has been debunked, however. But it’s no surprise that the military continued to have abysmal recruitment records throughout President Joe Biden’s tenure despite the claims of DEI proponents.

The diversity efforts seem to have done little to bring in a flood of recruits from previously underrepresented backgrounds. Worse, there has been a collapse of recruitment from demographics that disproportionately served in the past.

According to a report by the Daily Caller News Foundation, there has been a serious decline in white recruits since 2018.

That shouldn’t be a surprise, because as Daily Caller further reported, the Air Force in 2022 made reducing the number of white male officers a priority. Racial quotas not only damage the ability of the military to promote the best and brightest to the highest ranks, but they also demoralize those who either didn’t get a promotion and those who serve under commanders who they may now wonder whether or not they got their positions on their merits.

It’s no wonder retainment is also down in the military.

Most ominously for the U.S. all-volunteer military, the armed forces saw a severe downturn in recruitment from military families, many of whom have expressed extreme disenchantment with military service. Veterans also increasingly tell people not to sign up.

“Pew surveys in 2011 and again in 2019 found approximately 80% of veterans would advise young people to join the military,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October. “We recently commissioned a demographically representative YouGov survey of 2,100 veterans. Our data show the share of veterans recommending military service plunged 20 percentage points in five years, to just 62%.”

According to the Journal’s survey, “only 14% of veterans want the military to pay more attention to DEI.”

How can the United States continue to have the world’s most “lethal” army as its pool of warfighters dries up?

Those who defend DEI practices and insist that the military’s recruiting woes have nothing to do with DEI are in denial. At a time in which the number and scale of foreign conflicts is escalating, it’s alarming that the U.S. military appears increasingly unprepared to meet its challenges.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that even in the age of drones and other kinds of advanced military hardware, the backbone of any military is still a man with a rifle. What’s happened under Biden is that previous recruiting challenges became acute. The administration focused on divisive DEI programs while hiding behind the mantra that for the military, “diversity is our strength.”

We now have a glut of four-star generals, but too few rank-and-file troops, as Hegseth noted at Tuesday’s hearing.

Hegseth: “We won World War II with seven 4-star generals. Today, we have forty-four 4-star generals. There’s an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield. We don’t need more bureaucracy at the top. We need more warfighters empowered at the…

— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) January 14, 2025

“The military exists to be lethal and to kill our enemies,” former Army Ranger Will Thibeau explained in a recent interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

“It’s a purpose that puts the military at odds with the values of our liberal society. … And what’s happened, certainly in the last decade or so, is that the military has become just another institution that reflects the values of our civil society. Those are values that are incompatible with an organization committed to lethality.”

A change is leadership and direction is desperately needed. Perhaps in a sign of things to come, the Army recently had a massive surge in recruitment that it hasn’t experienced in many years.

That’s curious timing. Hopefully, it’s a sign of things to come under the incoming new executive management.