By Kevin Wallsten and Owen West
The veteran community has lost faith in the country’s national-security leadership. The military is a family business—80% of volunteers have a family member who served.
Three years into a recruiting crisis, however, the Pentagon hasn’t specifically surveyed this core constituency to determine what’s going wrong.
Pew surveys in 2011 and again in 2019 found approximately 80% of veterans would advise young people to join the military.
We recently commissioned a demographically representative YouGov survey of 2,100 veterans.
Our data show the share of veterans recommending military service plunged 20 percentage points in five years, to just 62%.
After watching four presidents lose two wars, buffeted by polarizing policy changes from one administration to another, veterans are no longer confident that their children and grandchildren will enjoy proper leadership.
When asked to grade performance in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, veterans gave presidents a C-minus. More than 80% of veterans who wouldn’t recommend service cited “mistrust of political leadership” as a “major factor.”
Generals didn’t fare much better, receiving a C-plus for their performance in recent wars.
More generally, a large section of the veteran community believes the military has lost mission focus.
In 2017, then-Defense Secretary James Mattis declared that lethality was the military’s lodestar. In our survey seven years later, only 18% of veterans say lethality has more focus.
Lethality now competes with a fixation on the internal composition of the force. “We are going to make sure,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in 2021, “that our military looks like America and that our leadership looks like what’s in the ranks of the military.”
Over the past three years, the Pentagon steadily erected a diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy. Diversity officers were installed throughout the ranks, systematically replacing Colin Powell’s “colorblind” philosophy with identity reporting up the chain of command.
The Air Force issued a memorandum in 2022 setting specific race and sex quotas for officers. In 2023 President Biden stated diversity was necessary for “all successful military operations,” ordering DEI to be embedded throughout the ranks.
Our survey underscores the unpopularity of these moves among veterans.
Contrary to President Biden’s claim, 57% say that diversity is “not essential” for military success, and 94% oppose race and sex preferences in military promotions. Only 14% of veterans want the military to pay more attention to DEI.
The focus on DEI is driving an especially profound disillusionment among conservative veterans, the military’s longstanding support bedrock.
Between 2019 and 2024, the percentage of conservative veterans who would advise a young family member to join the military declined from 88% to 53%. That almost entirely explains the shift in the broader veteran population.
Far more conservative veterans cited the “military’s DEI and other social policies” as a “major factor” (85%) in withholding their endorsement than the “possibility of physical injury or death” (33%) or the “possibility of psychological problems” (27%).
The military is heading in the wrong direction, say 90% of conservative veterans.
The recruiting crisis is a symptom of the leadership crisis. Recent presidents haven’t heartily encouraged military service.
Defense funding is near a record low as a percentage of gross domestic product. Rather than advocating for a stronger defense, retired generals alienate the force by weighing in on bitter political campaigns.
The military’s current leaders nervously balance racial head counts as they prepare for major war.
The values of a liberal democracy are different than those required to protect it.
DEI has done more harm than good to the military.
A refocus on war fighting will help restore the trust of our veterans.
Mr. Wallsten is a professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach State. Mr. West, a former Marine, served as an assistant secretary of defense for special operations, 2017-19.
First published on the Wall Street Journal
Evidence that the DEI/CRT agenda in the military DOES hurt recruiting and retention
I am a retired LTC. The military has been transformed into a DEI / WOKE affirmative action organization.
Senior officers and NCO’s are ass kissing politicians and the troops see that.
It will take years to fix what Obama, Biden and Harris have done to our military.
I would NOT recommend any young man to consider the military as a career choice.