Ideology, not lack of funds, is behind our military’s recruiting crisis

America’s military is in crisis, and it’s not one caused by the threat of a foreign adversary. Rather, the crisis we refer to is completely self-made and cannot be fixed by force. It is the fact that fewer and fewer young Americans are willing to sign up and join.

One presidential candidate recently raised the issue of re-expanding the Navy’s fleet of ships. And yes, rebuilding our navy is critical. But ships do not man themselves. What happens when we no longer have enough men and women willing to operate those ships? Nor is this problem exclusive to the Navy. What happens when we no longer have the manpower to operate artillery, drive tanks or fly and maintain fighter jets?

As story after story points out, the U.S. military currently cannot seem to find any remedies to turn its low recruiting numbers around. It has long been known that our country would be in trouble in the event of a major conventional war that required a draft. Some 77 percent of fighting-aged Americans would be ineligible for military service, according to the most recent numbers. As scary as that statistic is, its implications have so far been blunted by the comforting presence of our robust all-volunteer force — that is, until now.

It should really come as no surprise that our current military is having trouble bringing in new recruits. The lingering impacts of politicized vaccine mandates, as well as story after story about troops being brainwashed with divisive ideologies like woke gender theory and critical race theory, are damaging morale and discouraging potential volunteers. President Biden’s Pentagon brass seem more interested now about making sure that our military personnel are socially indoctrinated than that they are lethal.

This obsession with radical politics is diverting our military from its primary purpose, its core mission: to confront and defeat America’s enemies and defend our homeland, our interests and our way of life.

The military is trying to correct the problem by throwing more money at it in the form of bonuses. But all the money in the world is not worth doing a job you do not want to do. Putting your life on the line is not something most people just do for a paycheck. Those who treat it as such never stay long and they never go far. The question at hand is how we make the job something that people want to do again.

Young people join the military and take the oath of enlistment because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. The problem now is that the “something bigger” has become something entirely different than it used to be and something entirely foreign to most average Americans. If we want to address this recruiting problem, we need to stop letting politics get in the way of what makes military service appealing to would-be recruits — of what made it appealing to Chief Gallagher and others like him back in the day.

This isn’t just a problem for the military. We have to look at what young Americans are learning before they ever walk into a recruiting station or see an ad. America’s public school system is rife with openly anti-American curricula that turn people away from the thought of military service. How can we expect people to want to fight for a country they are told is not worth fighting for?

If we want to maintain our fighting force, we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot as a country. This means reinvigorating our school system with pro-American thinking by whatever means are available, including through expansion of school choice and educational freedom.

Freedom, as they say, is not free. We didn’t gain independence as a country by simply declaring it from Philadelphia. We had to fight for it, from Bunker Hill to Kings Mountain to Yorktown. We had to preserve it time and time again through the awesome force of our military, driven by the courage of countless sailors, soldiers, marines, and airmen on battlefields around the world.

It is up to us as citizens of this republic to ensure that their sacrifice was not in vain by preserving this republic for future generations of Americans. We simply cannot do that without a properly manned fighting force, and we will not have that unless and until we put our military back on track and stop letting politics poison its future.

Eddie Gallagher, a decorated combat veteran who served over 20 years in the U.S. Navy, is co-founder of the Pipe Hitter Foundation, where Dena Cruden is executive director.