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Anyone who thinks this is the result of the culture war should ask themselves one simple question: if there’s a huge recession and the young white male unemployment rate triples next year, do you really think these recruitment figures don’t budge?
The truth is that the US has been in an unprecedented (since the postwar era) employment boom since 2017. A young Midwestern or southern white man’s options in 2023, if they don’t go to college, are simply much much better than they were in 2010 or 2013 or even 2005 for that matter.
Why would anyone make $25,000 a year in the army when trucking companies are desperate for recruits and warehouses and gas stations are paying $60k+ a year. Where many trades pay six figures easily. Even decent personal trainers make triple what a new private does, and don’t have to spend months away from women and possibly risk their lives. What do young men care about? Girls, money and status. The military doesn’t offer the first two, and hasn’t offered the third since the Vietnam debacle.
Hispanic recruitment has risen because the population of Hispanics has risen, while black recruitment has held steady because of generations of outreach work to increase black enlistment and advertise in the black community. These offset the same impulse in those groups.
When was the last recruitment crisis in the army? Oh yeah, that’s right, it was in the booming economy of the 1990s. Who would have guessed? Triple pay for junior enlisted ranks and watch the recruitment crisis vanish.
Still, it’s a waste of goodwill. People used to want to serve for patriotic reasons. That was pure profit for the state. It was like a charity, they were fed and housed, but some of the work they did was effectively donated. As with billionaires, the state should find ways to encourage donations, not turn them away to make the diversity quota. You know, tell people what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them, all that jazz.
Sure, in a wider sense the military has been in a slow-motion recruitment crisis since around 1979 (really, since Vietnam). Enlisted pay was boosted by huge amounts in the 80s, and that and high unemployment and Reagan patriotism kept things from boiling over. The 90s saw the military shrink significantly, easing recruitment issues (although they were a big concern in the middle of that decade). A combination of 9/11 and the dotcom bust boosted numbers through the 2000s, then the Great Recession kept things fine until the mid-2010s. Now the historic pattern is just resuming.
A lot of people who enlisted in the 2000s just had a visceral reaction to 9/11 and wanted to go kill Arabs in revenge. That sounds uncharitable, but I don’t mean it that way, it just is what it is. You saw the same impulse in Israel after October 7, it’s just bloodlust and will to vengeance. The “major” Islamist terror attacks on American soil in the last decade have been by some random guy on a gay nightclub, by a Pakistani husband and wife on a California department of health party and by some Chechens on the finish of the Boston Marathon. None killed as many people as died in other mass shootings like the Vegas one committed by a white male with no discernible motive (and almost certainly not an Islamist one). That’s not driving anyone in a red state to war.
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