For a few years now, the U.S. military has bemoaned the dearth of young people lining up at its recruiting offices. The marketing geniuses assigned to each of our service branches are scratching their heads, seemingly unable to figure out why young Americans no longer want to defend their country.

“The Pentagon told the House Armed Services Committee in December that the services fell more than 40,000 recruits short of their annual goal,” reports The Washington Times. “It was the largest gap since the end of the draft more than 50 years ago.”

That’s not a downward trend. It’s a nosedive at a time when the world is a tinderbox waiting for a spark.

The Times adds: “Even with plenty of money and ‘bipartisan concern’ from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the Army, Navy and Air Force failed to accomplish their recruiting missions in the fiscal year that ended in September. One big challenge is hitting the target numbers without diluting the qualification standards to wear the uniform.”

Unfortunately, the higher-ups can’t see the forest for the trees, leaning on just about every excuse they can dream up, such as low unemployment, a strong economy, and competition from civilian employers. They also claim Americans are overweight and unable to meet basic entrance standards. In response, our desperate military has weakened or wholly eliminated its physical fitness standards and other qualifications.

Such measures won’t come without consequences. “Our military has become entangled in a perilous practice of lowering standards and ignoring crucial data,” reports the Washington Examiner, “all for the sake of a misguided political agenda. This has led to the slow erosion of the meritocracy that once characterized our armed forces.”

Kristin M. Griest, the nation’s first female infantry officer, adds that it’s “wholly unethical to allow the standards of the nation’s premier fighting units to degrade so badly, just to accommodate the lowest-performing soldiers.”

It’s good to know that the government and the military are worried about attracting new recruits, but they should stop deluding themselves as to the root causes, foremost among them being wokeness. The Armed Forces are bending over backward to pave the way for those unqualified to serve and to check all the boxes of the Democrats’ Diversity-Equity-Inclusion agenda.

According to retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, former director of the Center for National Defense: “Much of the emphasis of wokeness today is on promoting the idea that America is fatally flawed by systemic racism and white privilege. Our fighting men and women are required to sit through indoctrination programs, often with roots in the Marxist tenets of critical race theory, either by Pentagon diktat or through carelessness by senior leaders who delegate their command responsibilities to private Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion instructors.”

Moreover, to be more inclusive and to make sure no one is left out, the military has gone so far as scrapping its previous ban on HIV-positive soldiers serving in combat, providing time off for transgender counseling or surgery, and planning to hold a drag queen story hour on military bases. And it doesn’t help to boost confidence when young men and women who signed up to fight for freedom are told that the greatest threat to our nation is global warming. Or was it white supremacy?

No, the military isn’t worried about Marxist extremism. Instead, it’s obsessed with so-called right-wing extremism — or, in the parlance of Joe Biden and his fellow leftists, “MAGA Republicans.”

After the events of January 6, 2021, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day military-wide stand down to allow for discussions about extremism. But Pentagon brass didn’t get what they were fishing for, despite the incessant warnings of MAGA terrorists threatening our country from within. In fact, as the DOD concluded in its own report, “Extremist activity within the Department of Defense is rare.”

The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), commissioned by the Pentagon to investigate, concluded rather quietly this past week that extremism in the ranks is incredibly rare. “Good news,” reported The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. “The U.S. military isn’t packed with violent extremists. … The result won’t surprise Americans who have spent time in uniform, but it should calm the media frenzy about right-wing radicals in the armed forces.”

The devotion of our military’s current leadership is to Marxism, the religion of global warming, and DEI. That’s why young people don’t want to serve. To fix the problem, the Armed Forces need to get back to their warfighting roots — and get away from wokeness.