Military Recruitment Falls Short After Decades of War, Withdrawal From Afghanistan; The U.S. Military is Not Woke, But the Woke Threat is Real: The Potential Achilles' Heel of Our Military; The Military’s Worst Recruiting Year

Lolita Baldor / AP

Military recruitment falls short after decades of war, withdrawal from Afghanistan:

The Pentagon came up short on its recruitment goals, raising fresh questions about the challenges of maintaining an all-volunteer force.

The reasons for the shortfall, even with reduced recruitment targets, are multifaceted, according to military officials. The military services together missed goals by about 41,000 recruits in fiscal year 2023, said Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Ashish Vazirani.

"That number understates the challenge before us as the services lowered [their] end-strength goals in recent years, in part because of the difficult recruiting environment," he said. "The all-volunteer force faces one of its greatest challenges since inception."

Corie Weathers, a licensed professional counselor, military culture expert and author of "Military Culture Shift: The Impact of War, Money, and Generational Perspective on Morale, Retention, and Leadership," said two decades of war after Sept. 11, 2001, and a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan also have played a role in the recruitment shortfall.

"I think there's a lot of focus on Gen Z is the problem, not being fit for duty, or American disconnect, and there's definitely some quality of life issues happening in the [U.S. Department of Defense] as well," she told The Center Square. "So I think it's very complicated. And it's all of those things."

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can't be ignored.

"Probably a good half of our forces are older millennials and Gen X who experienced most of that two decades post 9-11," Weathers said. "They just had this sort of compounding stress that just continued throughout those two decades culminating and I know everybody globally went through COVID. But when COVID really hammered us on top of all the stress that we already going through, it was almost like a false peak or the psychological breaking point that happened after COVID."

Then came President Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Weathers called it "a moral injury for the force." --->READ MORE HERE

The U.S. Military is Not Woke, But the Woke Threat is Real

The potential Achilles' heel of our military.

I remember the day vividly, standing in formation in the hot Kentucky sun at Ft. Knox. “Look to your left and to your right,” the sergeant said. “You are all wearing the same uniform, you all bleed the same color blood. There is no color here other than green.” But by the end of my career, there were directives coming down from Washington D.C. telling us that some of our service members were somehow different, as was the case when we were told we should counsel some of our soldiers letting them know they can change the gender on their ID cards. I wasn’t about to single out a soldier, and I doubt very many did in any branch of the services.

But aside from causing a few eyerolls, woke policies in the military are more of a distraction at this point than anything else and are thankfully being largely ignored other than service members being ordered to sit through the regularly occurring death by PowerPoint. However, that in no way diminishes the very real threat it poses.

The United States military remains the most effective fighting force on the planet, and although wokeness has not yet significantly infected the military, the woke cancer continues to grow, threatening the cohesion of America’s fighting forces. Every hour that a service member wastes sitting through unnecessary woke briefings, is an hour lost that should have been spent on warfighter training, leaving us less prepared for the next war.

Woke policies, unnecessary political correctness at the expense of readiness or the success of a mission, have been and continue to be pushed at the behest of politicians inside the beltway. But the problem with their efforts to change the way our military operates is that it doesn’t need changing. The military is one place where true diversity has already been achieved.

“Through generations of sacrifices by our brave military members, all fighting for each other and for our Constitution, the American military today is unmatched in the world,” Congressman Darrell Issa, a fellow former Army captain, told me. “They are the most effective and diverse professional team of men and women, who do not need Washington politicians and bureaucrats telling them how to work together. We owe it to those heroes to give them our support, not detrimental policies that could cost lives.”

Major General (Ret.) David Baldwin, the former Adjutant General in charge of the California National Guard from 2011 to 2022, reminds us “The cornerstone of our system is civilian control of the military. So, even after military leaders give them input, we have to suck it up and do what they say, even if we think it wrong or detrimental, as long as it doesn’t violate the Constitution.” During his tenure, he said most of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies were benign topics, not the stuff we see in the headlines, “Most of this stuff had to do with selection boards, like taking names, photos, and gender off of records so boards aren’t biased,” he said. --->READ MORE HERE

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+++++The Military’s Worst Recruiting Year+++++

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