A Cultural Decline in Defending America
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This is a riff on a Strategika article by Owen West and Kevin Wallsten from January 2025.
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% in 2024. This shows institutional confidence is ephemeral, tied to politics and performance.
For twelve of the past sixteen years, our military has relied more on shifting social values than steady martial standards to maintain its all-volunteer force (AVF). Its performance in recent years has done little to arrest the long-term cultural decline in the youth we ask to defend America.
Before the Vietnam era, military service enjoyed broad prestige. Over 15% of all 19-year-old men joined the military in 1964. The military drafted only a quarter of the recruits. Enlistees volunteered for a military that enjoyed societal approval but paid a pittance. The social upheaval of Vietnam caused Congress to do away with drafting soldiers altogether, converting to the AVF in 1973. 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 the military during recessions and booms, military disasters and swift victories, periods of flashy popularity and morose perception. When unemployment fell, Congress increased pay. During the wartime surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, standards 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 perceived benefits of military service faded. Having a relative who had served in earlier decades influenced the younger generation. After the post-9/11 patriotism faded, 80% of recruits came from military families where service remained ingrained.
The military was a family business.
But not a growth business. American military volunteerism had been declining for decades, masked by changes in population, composition, and compensation. The US population grew by 75% from 1964 to 2024, but recruiting needs plunged from 400,000 enlistees to 150,000. The percentage of women joining steadily grew from less than 1% to 18% of the force, masking the disinterest among men. Service motivation increasingly gave way to compensation. In 1964, enlisted soldiers earned less than most of their counterparts in the private sector. Today, enlisted service members are in the 83rd percentile of comparable civilian pay, not including potential college and VA benefits.
The White Male Recruitment Crisis
Male enlistments in the Army fell 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.
The Next Crisis
As long as the demand for troops was shrinking, the Pentagon could deal with small supply shocks, but in August 2021, the US pulled out of Afghanistan. Watching the hasty withdrawal splashed across the screens large and small, the abandonment of allies…who’d want to serve a leader who would authorize that? 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, a 25% gap. In 2023, The military combined fell short by 41,000 recruits. The Pentagon referred vaguely to a broad “recruiting crisis,” meaning enlistments had declined across all demographic groups.
Well, no…
The 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.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion—DEI for short—distrusts intuitions of all descriptions, including the military. Because of it, the military came to view its longstanding promise to strip recruits of societal values and reboot them with the martial code as a relic. Uncomprehending, unable or unwilling to stand for martial values under 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,” to appeal to progressives. Drag queen digital takeovers bracketed official communications emphasizing duty, honor, and country; anime depicted the military as a refuge from childhood trauma; bullets in rainbow pride colors flew with abandon from flower-bedecked weapons.
It backfired and got worse after the Afghan rout.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on DEI caused everyone to withdraw. 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%). In 2020, 20% of high school Republican men said they wanted to serve, dropping to 15% in 2023—the lowest in forty years. In 2021, 65% of teens in military households said they wanted to serve. Only two years later, that figure had fallen to 32%. Worse, DEI 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 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. Advised by his generals, Biden in 2023 said that diversity was necessary “for all successful military operations.” The Pentagon failed to recruit the progressives, and it alienated the conservatives. DEI, the darling of the “progressives” and more accurately described as Division, Exclusion, Indoctrination, drove a generation away from the ranks.
What is to be done?
The military must reconcile meritocracy with efforts that broaden the pool to interest DEI-infused recruits and keep top talent. President Trump will try to abolish DEI in the military, but it’s an uphill battle against intrenched interests and much louder voices, especially on social media, who often just rename their programs. 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, and the recruiting numbers soared after the June 2025 MIDNIGHT HAMMER strikes. 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. After Trump leaves office in 2029, 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.
Ask the vets.
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. The Pentagon has to receive tough input from our veterans about the new procedures. Congress can’t throw more money at a recruiting problem the military refuses to analyze. Enlisting in 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 arm them. Funded at a paltry 3% of GDP, the level we were at in 1940, our defense base, despite showy high-tech bomb strikes, appears increasingly weak in our adversaries, increasing the probability of war. 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.
Great civilizations are not murdered; they commit suicide.
Arnold Toynbee
Civilizations eventually lose their vigor, misspend their wealth, self-indulge, and under-fund their military forces, which leads to their downfall. Is America following that path? Our military reflects our culture. Until audited by a major war, we won’t know whether our 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—or can we find—the right stuff to prevail or even survive?
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And Finally...
On 31 January:
1543: Future founder of the last and longest shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu, is born in Okazaki Castle, Aichi, Japan. He was the third of the three “Great Unifiers” of Japan, with Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, credited with ending the 150 year Sengoku period of civil war.
1943: Friedrich Von Paulus surrenders himself and a bulk of his command at the Gumrak Department Store in Stalingrad, Russia. Though the rest of the Stalingrad cauldron wouldn’t stop fighting for another two days, von Paulus’ capture is considered the end of the campaign. Upwards of 200,000 men would march into captivity; fewer than 5,000 would return.
And today is HELL IS FREEZING OVER DAY, commemorating this day in 1943 when a dam on the Rouge River broke and partially flooded the main street of the ill-defined hamlet of Hell (Fenton), Michigan, and froze. The event was marked by the local newspaper headline as “HELL FREEZES OVER,” a story obscured by the events in Russia.