The Patriot Post® · Recruiting Suffers Badly in Joe Biden's Army

What a shocker. No one wants to defend our nation anymore.

In what can only be described as a predictable train wreck, Joe Biden’s U.S. Army is failing miserably on the recruiting front. How miserably? So far this year, the Army has hit a pathetic 40% of its recruiting goals, with the numbers now so bad that the Department of Defense has been forced to reduce its planned total force size.

What did they expect? Today’s woke Army brass somehow think it’s a good idea to teach our nation’s black-skinned warriors that they’re being oppressed by their white-skinned colleagues. And that the key to hitting our recruitment numbers is tapping into that rich trove of “transgender” warriors by offering free sex-change operations. And that young people who’ve decided against taking that experimental vaccine to protect themselves from a virus that has now become little more than a common cold should be disqualified from potential service.

Sadly, though, rather than face up to these obvious errors in judgment, the official Army line is that recruiting is down due to a “highly competitive job market [converging] with a mass of troops leaving as the coronavirus pandemic subsides.” Uh-huh.

Not even a drastic lowering of recruiting standards seems to be helping. No high school diploma nor GED? No problem, says the Army. (Well, until the Army reversed course on that.) They’re even offering “quick-ship” signing bonuses of $35,000, but to little avail.

Making matters worse, as The Washington Free Beacon reports: “The military service members who are not vaccinated, or do not have a pending or approved exemption, will no longer be allowed to drill or train, Army officials said last week. If noncompliance continues, officials say they will discharge them.”

How many military personnel does that affect? Roughly 60,000 in the Army alone.

So in the midst of a recruiting crisis, the Army is kicking out some of its best and brightest. We guess the flogging will continue until troop morale improves.

North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee personnel panel, says we’re on the cusp of a recruiting crisis.

“To put it bluntly,” said Tillis at a hearing in April, “I am worried we are now in the early days of a long-term threat to the all-volunteer force.” He further noted that there’s “a small and declining number of Americans who are eligible and interested in military service,” adding that “every single metric tracking the military recruiting environment is going in the wrong direction.”

How bad has it gotten? According to Tillis, just 8% of young Americans have seriously considered joining the military, while only 23% are eligible to enlist.

Every branch has suffered in terms of recruiting. But it isn’t just recruiting, although that’s certainly a major part of it. Today’s military is undergoing a staffing shortage across the board. As Chuck DeVore, a retired former Army officer, writes at The Federalist:

This military decay will continue under President Joe Biden’s disastrous anti-leadership and likely will take many years of concerted effort to reverse. Further, combined with the chaotic defeat in Afghanistan, America’s ability to deter its enemies from taking hostile action is at a low not seen since the late 1970s, making a major war far more likely.

There are three growing signs of trouble: an alarming collapse in recruiting, a profoundly unserious national security leadership, and weakness in the military supply chain and procurement.

The Army’s recruiting message needs work, too. An op-ed in Task and Command notes that today’s advertising campaigns have badly missed the mark, and that recruiting has relied largely on an outdated model that has failed to embrace new technology — you know, like the Internet and social media and smart phones.

DeVore concludes with a grim observation: “My own decision to enlist the military in 1983 was motivated by President Ronald Reagan and his call to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In 2007, I retired as a lieutenant colonel. If I were 20 today, there’d be zero chance I’d enlist to serve under a group of people whom I thought hated me and despised my political views — and who would use my time in military service as a cross between a reeducation camp and an armed international social service agency.”

But you go, Army. You keep telling yourselves that this is all about Joe Biden’s bustling economy and that killer job market.