Army officials puzzle over significant drop in white recruits

Military officials and leftists in Washington have long bemoaned the overwhelming presence of white people in the U.S. military. Now that race obsessives have gotten their way and far fewer recruits from the disfavored group are enlisting, officials are beginning to fret.

According to Military.com, the U.S. Army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target in 2023. This drop was largely driven by a significant drop in the number of white recruits.

In 2018, 44,042 new Army recruits — 56.4% of the total — were white. Over the years, that number has plummeted, hitting 25,070 or 44% of the overall recruits in 2023, down 6% from the previous year. This demographic group has seen a uniquely dramatic decline when compared to other racial groups.

Overall recruiting totals have remained relatively flat for black and Hispanic recruits, but as white recruits have turned out in smaller numbers, the proportions of black and Hispanic recruits in the pool have increased from 20% to 24% and from 17% to 24%, respectively.

Military.com indicated it encountered even more damning data speaking to a dramatic "shift in demographics" but that Army officials wrote it off as a "system coding error."

Army officials told Military.com that there is not one single cause for this decline but indicated obesity and the poor quality of the public education system might have been factors. While these factors might explain a drop in recruitment across the board, they wouldn't explain a racially specific drop in proportion of 12.4 points over a five-year period.

An Army official suggested the decline may have also been political, driven by conservatives' critiques of the Biden administration and its politicization of the military. The official, paraphrased by Military.com, credited conservative lawmakers and right-wing media in particular with souring their "overwhelmingly white audience" against the military over its identity politics and with prompting would-be recruits in the mix to "abando[n] their warfighting priorities."

"There's a level of prestige in parts of conservative America with service that has degraded. Now, you can say you don't want to join, for whatever reason, or bad-mouth the service without any cultural guilt associated for the first time in those areas," said the official.

Besides taking issue with the Pentagon's radical LGBT activism, abortion promotion, and its sweeping accusations of extremism, the erosion of such guilt among white people and conservatives might also have something to do with the military's apparent animus toward them.

A 2011 report ordered by Congress claimed the military was too white and too male.

The Pentagon released a manual blasting "healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian" men for having "unearned advantages of social privilege."

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Mark Milley, complained in 2021 that the military was not diverse enough, stressing, "We must get better." He also defended the Pentagon's embrace of critical race theory, stating, "I want to understand white rage."

A battalion commander reportedly stressed in 2021, "If you're a white male, you are part of the problem."

It appears that in remedying a perceived problem, the Army created a real problem at a time of great international instability.

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