Military Recruitment Is Plummeting: Blame the Pentagon
‘Veterans no longer want their kids to enlist. Here’s why.’
Lately, military-age males have stayed away from the military in droves. General officers and senior civilians in the Pentagon blame a poor public education system and decades of video games for creating a generation of young men not mentally and physically qualified to serve — and there is certainly some truth to that.
But if senior Pentagon officials want to get to the bottom of the Biden-era recruiting dip, they should look in the mirror and at the picture of the sitting president on the wall of virtually every office in the five-sided wind tunnel in Arlington, Virginia. (READ MORE: What’s a Defense Industrial Base, Lindsay Graham?)
They have created a military culture across the services in which few red-blooded American males want to participate. Many — uniformed and otherwise — claim that their manpower policies are not that much different than those of the Trump administration. They fail to recognize, however, that the difference lies in leadership style and tone.
Democrats Used the Military for Social Experiments
Since the 1960s, Democratic administrations have engaged in a series of social experiments, and nearly all have been disastrous or have resulted in a degradation of military readiness. Perhaps the most egregious of these was the infamous Project 100,000 during the Johnson administration.
Lyndon B. Johnson had a problem during the Vietnam War: There were high unemployment numbers, particularly among young ghetto dwellers, and not enough qualified draftees were being inducted to support his Vietnam adventure. At the advice of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Johnson directed the DOD to ignore the intelligence grading scores on military aptitude entrance tests to gain at least 100,000 new recruits. Thus, Project 100,000 was born.
