Can Trump Fix The Recruiting Crisis?
Pete Hegseth seems to think so
As the Biden administration winds down, the president-elect is making his first major cabinet picks. His choice of Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense is raising eyebrows, with prominent Democratic Senators voicing doubt in Hegseth’s ability to handle the responsibilities of the post. While he has served as a Natinal Guard officer as well as a financial analyst, and has degrees from Princeton and Harvard, Hegseth admittedly has never held a rank higher than captain. However, his politcal views are what agitate Democrats the most. His public statements, for example denouncing Rep. Rashida Tlaib as having “a Hamas agenda,” would be controversial enough without his views on “woke” programming in the military.
“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Hegseth recently said. “Any general that was involved [or] admiral that was involved in any of the DEI woke sh*t has got to go,” Hegseth told podcaster Shawn Ryan. “Either you’re in for warfighting and that’s it, that’s the only litmus test we care about. You’ve got to get DEI and CRT out of the military academies so you’re not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking.” He wants a return to standards and merit-based promotion. “There’s a reason people don’t serve. It’s because they don’t trust that their senior leaders are going to have their best interests in mind in combat” anymore, he said.
Hegseth published a book this summer, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. Assuming that Donald Trump still wants Hegseth, it is one of the books I plan to review before the inauguration on 20 January. In the meantime, Hegseth has laid out the core thesis of his book for The New York Post, and recruiting is at the top of his concerns.
White males have always been the majority of recruits, but in recent years the Pentagon has struggled to attract them to serve in uniform. Hegseth writes that “we can’t wait to recruit our largest and most important military demographic until a crisis occurs. But that’s just what Biden’s woke policies have done.”
“For the past three years — after President Barack Obama poured the social justice foundation — the Pentagon, across all branches, has embraced the social justice messages of gender equity, racial diversity, climate stupidity, and the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes,” Hegseth complains. “Only one problem: There just aren’t enough lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne. Not only do the lesbians not join, but those very same ads turn off the young, patriotic, Christian men who have traditionally filled our ranks.” When they do join, those same “young, patriotic, Christian men” find that the Pentagon has higher priorities than victory.
Since the Battle of Kadesh ca. 1274 BC, which is the very first battle that we know very much about, all large armies in history have been ‘social experiments’ in the sense that they contained many different nations, cultures, and even languages. However, ‘diversity’ has never been a factor in victory — indeed, overcoming the barriers to cooperation created by diversity is one of the enduring challenges of military success. Further complicating modern revisionist ideas about military history, the ‘diversity’ of armies prior to 1948 was almost always shaped by whole units consisting of this ethnicity, or that tribe, alongside units of different ethnicities or tribes. A unit of people who don’t know and trust one another — who lack esprit de corps — is bound to fail under the stress of combat. Even if it suffers from command prejudice, such a unit can still reorganize and overcome its challenges.
Efforts to make the American military reflect some idealized demographic picture of American society are also bound to fail, Hegseth argues, because a military must have mass, so some group will always have to make a up a majority of that mass. At Kadesh, the army of Ramses II was mostly Egyptian. In the US Army today, it is simply a demographic necessity that most soldiers must be white men, Hegseth argues. Emphasis added:
The military cannot be organized like a Harvard fraternity, catering to ever-more-obscure constituencies. Our key constituency is normal men, looking to be heroes and not victims. We aren’t a collection of aggrieved tribes. Equality is our bedrock, lethality our trademark. There is no black and white in our ranks. We are all green. Our strength is not in our diversity, but in our unity and in our love for each other, our families, and, most of all, our nation. This is a truth I have lived firsthand in Iraq.
As much as this idea conflicts with progressive idealism, it does reflect what military advocates have said about the three-year recruiting crisis under Joe Biden. In a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, for example, two distinguished veterans wrote that their community “has lost faith in the country’s national-security leadership,” while “the Pentagon hasn’t specifically surveyed this core constituency to determine what’s going wrong.”
What has happened, the authors argue, is that the intergenerational chain of trust was broken. “The military is a family business — 80% of volunteers have a family member who served,” Kevin Wallsten and Owen West noted. A “YouGov survey of 2,100 veterans” commissioned by the authors found “the share of veterans recommending military service plunged 20 percentage points in five years, to just 62%.” At least 80 percent of negative respondents cited “mistrust of political leadership” as the reason. “The focus on DEI is driving an especially profound disillusionment among conservative veterans, the military’s longstanding support bedrock.”
Between 2019 and 2024, the percentage of conservative veterans who would advise a young family member to join the military declined from 88% to 53%. That almost entirely explains the shift in the broader veteran population. Far more conservative veterans cited the “military’s DEI and other social policies” as a “major factor” (85%) in withholding their endorsement than the “possibility of physical injury or death” (33%) or the “possibility of psychological problems” (27%). The military is heading in the wrong direction, say 90% of conservative veterans.
Biden administration priorities could not have been more opposed to the military culture. In a 2021 congressional hearing on the ‘woke military,’ Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin claimed that “diversity, equity and inclusion is important to this military now and it will be important in the future.” Signing an executive order to install a new DEI bureaucracy throughout the Department of Defense at every level of command in 2023, President Biden declared that diversity was necessary for “all successful military operations,” a laughable assertion to this military historian. ‘Colorblind’ policies have been replaced by ‘equity’ and ‘identity’ along the entire chain of command, corrupting the culture of merit and achievement in uniform.
“Our survey underscores the unpopularity of these moves among veterans,” Wallsten and West explain. “Contrary to President Biden’s claim, 57% say that diversity is ‘not essential’ for military success, and 94% oppose race and sex preferences in military promotions. Only 14% of veterans want the military to pay more attention to DEI.” This is a western cultural value, to be sure, but one that dates back to the New Model Army and is not going anywhere, despite all efforts to shame it out of existence. “The values of a liberal democracy are different than those required to protect it,” the authors write.
Radical individualism is incompatible with a mission-focus on lethal action against the enemy. Policies which create disunity are incompatible with victory. It is why armies wear uniforms and march together. Identitarian politics, on the other hand, is a great way to lose wars and get a lot of people killed.
Recruitment also requires gatekeeping. Poor health and physical weakness are legitimate reasons to exclude anyone from military service. Another Biden priority was transgender ‘inclusion.” The Obama administration first opened the military to transgender recruits in 2016, but Trump banned them the following year. Reversing that ban was one of Biden’s first acts in the Oval Office. Trump has vowed to restore the ban if elected, and I see no reason to doubt him.
A full treatment of this issue would be an essay of its own. Under the Obama administration, I simply shrugged at the question, while the Trump ban bothered me at the time, as I agreed that all able-bodied Americans have a right to serve. However, having researched and written in this issue space for some years now, my view has changed. Start with the term “able-bodied.”
Set aside the question of expense. Troops who have ‘transitioned,’ or are currently ‘transitioning,’ are medically dependent. A soldier receiving exogenous hormones is not deployable to any war zone where they might be cut off from their supply, and if captured, they may not receive those hormones from the captor, adding risk. Any medical transition that takes place while in uniform will reduce the amount of time during their enlistment that they can actually serve. Transgender surgeries have extraordinarily high complication rates, and the more surgeries are involved in the ‘transition,’ the less enlistment time the soldier will be deployable. Even hormonal transition has health effects that reduce deployability.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is also required to cover medical transition, creating a perverse incentive for recruits to enlist in order to pursue sex reassignment after their service instead of reenlisting. Don’t laugh: one man has already joined the Special Forces so that he could beat up women in the MMA ring. He now insists that everyone should use female pronouns when referring to him, which brings us to the biggest problem with transgender ideology in the military: it requires everyone to lie.
Lies are noxious to the same culture of military service veterans that produces most of America’s recruits. Lies are deleterious to good order and discipline. Feelings are not important in uniform. Self-regulation, which requires an internal locus of behavioral control, is essential to success in uniform. Pronouns and other lies required to salve the feelings of someone with a ‘gender identity’ remove the onus of behavioral regulation from the individual in uniform and place it on everyone else in uniform.
It is sad, perhaps, but true that most ‘trans people’ do not ‘pass.’ That is, they do not resemble the opposite sex enough for a stranger to not see what they really are. A person who does ‘pass’ is almost always born passing. Gender nonconformity is another genetic lottery, and the ethic of military veterans is that life ain’t fair, so get over yourself.
Military culture appreciates human sex difference because it is essential to good order and discipline. “Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, that means casualties are worse,” Hegseth told Shawn Ryan. Whereas a black man is a man, able to perform the same as a white man, women are not men, nor able to perform as well as men. Because the Pentagon has “changed the standards” to fit women into combat units, they have “changed the capability of that unit,” and not necessarily for the better.
I graduated US Army basic training a year before the last all-male classes. Female soldiers had their own company in the battalion and my drill sergeants would yell if we even looked at a female in uniform. ‘Gender integration’ of basic training in the Clinton administration demonstrably altered the Army. As a result of my observations, I entered military history with an eye on women’s military history. My findings so far are that women have always served in combat service support roles of one kind or another: camp maintenance, washing and tending and mending, forage and supply, etc. Women have historically contributed to warfare in combat support roles such as collecting the wounded, fetching ammunition, conveying messages, and other tasks that bring them to the battlefield.
Women in combat roles however are rare. They occur most often in the most deperate moments of a siege, usually throwing stones at attackers in escalade (climbing ladders) against a city wall, sometimes using a sword, axe, spear, or other weapon to strike a man at the vulnerable moment he reaches the top of the ladder, or firing a cannon. An all-female team of artillerists reputedly operated the mangonel (catapult) which killed Simon de Montfort during the siege of Toulouse in 1218. Some women have been able to ‘pass’ as male soldiers (see above), but these rare exceptions prove the rule that almost every fighter who has ever marched off to war in human history was male. The Agojie, an all-female unit in the Praetorian guard of the kings of Dahomey, served for a century before it was destroyed by an all-male French legion.
Today, women serve in the war in Ukraine. Women are sometimes killed in that drone-infested battlespace, and also operate many of the drones. Still, most of the fighters killed by drones are male, and males also operate most of the drones. Women are present throughout the battlespace filling all kinds of roles, but rarely fight at close quarters. This is consistent with the very low rates of violent crimes by females as opposed to males. Males are simply more violent by nature — a politically incorrect conclusion, perhaps, but an empirical one.
“The Biden administration, like many before it, attempted to turn the military into a social experimentation laboratory,” Gary Anderson writes at Real Clear Defense. “Most of the red-blooded American men which the military needs do not want to participate in group self-deprecating seminars. They want to join an organization dedicated, if necessary, to locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy assault by fire and close combat when the nation needs it” (emphasis added). “The Biden administration ignored this, and that is largely why we have a military recruiting problem.”
Anderson points to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 as the source of bloat in the ranks of general officers. America’s military has become top-heavy. As part of his campaign emphasis on efficiency, Trump has proposed a “warrior board” of retired generals, admirals, and senior noncommissioned officers to review the work of three- and four-star general officers and admirals, ostensibly to weed out the “woke.” In particular, Trump has vowed to fire Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr, Biden’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that Hegseth mentioned to Ryan, for his role in the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Accountability is overdue. Caution is warranted, however, because some generals are always politicians, while others are technicians, and both types are necessary to the functions of the chain of command. Among political generals, the “woke” are also a minority. Partisan purges are the beginning of the end of the republic, so we must hope a “warrior board” would focus on banishing bad performance.
More problematically, Pete Hegseth championed the cause of two American soldiers that Trump pardoned, Mathew L. Golsteyn and Clint Lorance, in 2019. Golsteyn and Lorance were convicted in separate murder cases. Hegseth has also supported Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, who was acquitted of murdering an ISIS prisoner. Upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice is vital to ensuring good order and discipline. More to the point, however, these cases galvanized the veterans community, which makes Hegseth a favorite of that community, which bodes well for the effect his confirmation would have on recruiting.
No matter who the commander-in-chief is, the United States military has to solve its recruiting crisis. The surest test of the theory that Joe Biden’s “woke” administration was responsible for the three-year shortfall will be whether it disappears altogether during the second Trump presidency. His choice of Hegseth tells us he is serious about fixing the problem.
