In 1964, 75% of the public held a very favorable view of the military and its leaders. That dropped to 24% when Saigon fell in 1975, surged to 80% after 9/11, and plunged to 60% last year. This indicates institutional confidence is ephemeral, tied to politics and performance. Unfortunately, our military relies more on values than confidence to maintain its all-volunteer force (AVF). Its performance one way or another has done little to arrest the long-term cultural decline in youth compelled to defend America.
Before Vietnam, military service enjoyed broad prestige. Four hundred thousand youths joined the military in 1964—more than 15% of all 19-year-old men—for a very skimpy paycheck. Only a quarter of recruits were drafted. The majority of enlistees had volunteered for a military that enjoyed societal approval but paid a pittance. The social upheaval during the Vietnam War caused the White House and Congress to enthusiastically do away with drafting soldiers altogether, converting to the AVF in 1973. The economist Milton Friedman argued that better pay would attract recruits who would otherwise seek employment. Congress approved a healthy raise, and enlistments immediately increased.
For fifty years this model worked. Volunteers entered our military during recessions and booms, military disasters and swift victories, periods of flashy popularity and morose perception. When unemployment fell, Congress increased pay. During wartime surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, standards were lowered slightly, then raised when troops returned home. Even when entrance standards dipped, the enlisted force remained far more educated than it had been before Vietnam, with high school graduation rates above 90%, compared to 50% in 1964.
Throughout this period, society grew more progressive and the cultural benefits of military service faded. Recruiters tended toward Red states that contributed proportionately more volunteers than did Blue states. Having a relative who had served years ago influenced the younger generation. After post-9/11 patriotism faded, 80% of recruits were sourced from military families where service remained ingrained. The military was a family business.
It wasn’t a growth business, though. American military volunteerism had been declining for decades, masked by changes in population, composition, and compensation. The U.S. population grew by 75% from 1964 to 2024, but recruiting needs plunged from 400,000 enlistees to 150,000. The percentage of women enlistees steadily grew from less than 1% to 18% of the force, obscuring growing disinterest among single men. Service motivation increasingly gave way to compensation. Enlisted soldiers in 1964 were paid in the lower third compared to their peers in the private sector. Today our enlisted servicemembers are in the 83rd percentile of comparable civilian pay, not including potential college and VA benefits.
Crisis
As long as demand for troops was shrinking, the Pentagon could deal with small supply shocks. The AVF steady state, however, was interrupted in 2021. With little warning, the National Guard fell 8,000 recruits short of its end-strength goal. In 2022, the volunteer deficit sharply worsened. The Army fell 15,000 troops short, an astonishing 25% gap unseen in the history of the AVF. In 2023, The military combined fell short by 41,000 recruits. The timing was puzzling. When volunteerism hit the wall, the country had few troops deployed in combat and pay was at the highs. The Pentagon referred vaguely to a broad “recruiting crisis,” meaning enlistments had declined across all demographic groups.
The Pentagon was not being entirely accurate. The military has a “white male recruitment crisis.” Since 2013, male enlistments in the Army have fallen 35%, dropping from 58,000 new recruits in 2013 to just 37,700 in 2023. From 2018 to 2023, the number of white recruits in the Army fell from 44,042 to just 25,070. No other demographic group experienced a comparable decline. Sensing a sudden disinterest among white males, the Marines boosted their longstanding Latino overrepresentation to over 30% of accessions to make mission.
What changed? First, the recent progressive movement has profoundly affected young, white Democratic men. For decades, recruiting polls have shown scant difference among young males. As recently as 2015, 19% of young, white Democratic men wanted to serve, compared to 20% of Blacks, Latinos and white Republicans. But by 2021, white Democrat male willingness to serve had plunged to 3%, four times lower than Black and Latino men, and eight times lower than white Republicans. The percentage of high school Democrats who say the military does a “good job” had similarly declined, from 84% in 2002 to 35% in 2023. According to Gallup, only 12% of Democrats aged 18 to 24 were “extremely proud” to be American, down from 54% in 2004. If you’re not proud of your country, you won’t fight for it. Institutional distrust—an inherent component of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI)—drove a generation of white liberals away from the military.
Unfazed, uncomprehending, or unwilling to stand firm on martial values after the election of President Biden, the Pentagon changed its recruiting strategy in 2021 to diversify and grow its base. Advertisements emphasized individualism over assimilation, including DEI phraseology like “individual truth” and “authentic self,” presumably to appeal to liberals. Official communications emphasizing duty, honor, and country were bracketed by drag queen digital takeovers, anime depicted the military as a refuge from childhood trauma, and bullets painted in rainbow pride colors. It was “a distinct departure” from traditional recruiting, according to the Army. The military’s longstanding promise to strip recruits of societal values and reboot them with martial code was rejected as a relic. These efforts were supposed to attract minority groups. They did not. Desire to serve in the armed forces dropped between 2020 and 2023 among African American high school seniors (18% to 12%), Latino high school seniors (16% to 8%) and female high school seniors (12% to 7%).
Second, the Pentagon’s emphasis upon DEI caused conservatives to withdraw. In 2020, 20% of high school Republican men said they wanted to serve, dropping to 15% in 2023—the lowest in over twenty years. In 2021, 65% of teens in military households said they wanted to serve. Only two years later, that figure had fallen to 32%. DEI efforts also alienated the military’s main recruiting pipeline: veteran families. According to data from the 2019 Pew Military Survey and the 2024 Survey of Military Veterans, the percentage of conservative veterans who would advise a young family member to join the military plummeted from 88% in 2019 to only 53% in 2024. Conservative veterans in the survey cited the “military’s DEI and other social policies” as a major factor in withholding their endorsement, far greater than concerns about wartime injuries, VA care, or pay.
The Pentagon worked itself into a cul-de-sac. It failed to recruit the progressives and it alienated the conservatives.
What is to be Done?
First, the uniformed military—the generals and admirals as the leaders—must reconcile the military meritocracy with efforts that broaden the pool and retain top talent, as Colin Powell did in the 1990s. They have evaded doing so. Advised by his generals, President Biden said last year that diversity was necessary “for all successful military operations.” Conservative veterans resoundingly disagree. Which is it? Divisive DEI policy initiatives did not attract more diverse recruits, but they did temporarily drive away conservative veterans and their children.
President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth will abolish DEI. The Reagan National Defense Surveys fielded in mid-November 2023 and mid-November 2024 already show a significant post-election uptick in service interest among Americans under 30. But the military has not acknowledged its fundamental recruiting error. We are in a period of cultural interregnum concerning who will defend America, or why. In three years, the military could as easily tip back to DEI, since it has not defined where it really stands or what it believes. The same is true of losing the war in Afghanistan; the military promised an explanation that never came. (Interestingly, veterans do not cite our performance there as a reason to recommend or withhold service recommendations.)
Second, the military must get serious about heeding its core constituency: the veterans whose endorsements are key to sourcing 80% of its volunteers. It must establish close ties with the veteran community. The Pentagon understands “influencers” are key recruit drivers, devoting a major poll to random adults who “influence youths ages 16-24.” Few respondents are veterans, and there is no sensitivity analysis tying policy changes to precious service recommendations. We have to be willing to receive tough input from our veterans on new procedures. Congress can’t throw more money at a recruiting problem the military refuses to analyze. Enlisting for the military already puts you in the top 20% of all young, comparable wage earners. Yet the DoD has fallen behind on manufacturing munitions to sufficiently arm them. Funded at a paltry 3% of GDP, the level we were at in 1940, our defense base appears increasingly weak to our adversaries, increasing the probability of war—and a draft.
Third, let’s not delude ourselves about our imperiled national security. The oscillation between commanders-in-chief, from progressive Obama to conservative Trump to progressive Biden to conservative Trump reflects a divisive country without a shared sense of values. We are not the country we were in 1964—or even 1994. No modern president has heartily called on American youth to join its military. The deepening cynicism of young people on the political left is a corrosive problem. On the right, there is a growing belief in isolationism, as if we can turn back the clock to the 19th Century.
The historian Toynbee concluded: “Great civilizations are not murdered; they commit suicide.” Eventually civilizations lose their vigor, misspend their wealth, self-indulge, underfund their military forces, and are swept aside. Is America following that path? Our military reflects our culture. Until audited by a major war, we won’t know whether our shrinking all-volunteer force—recruited for some mix of adventurism, military professionalism, patriotism, and pay—will overcome our quantifiable shortages of mass firepower. Do we have the right stuff to prevail?
Owen West, a Marine, served as assistant secretary of defense for special operations from 2017–2019.
Kevin Wallsten is a professor of political science at Cal State Long Beach
