Diversity Thursday

when you're losing military families...

Everyone knows there is a problem with recruiting. We also know that the military is a family business.

Is there a connection?

Kevin Wallsten, a professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, and Owen West, a former Marine who served as an assistant secretary of defense for special operations from 2017-2019, recently published an article in The Wall Street Journal (24 October) titled, 'DEI Is Crushing Military Recruitment,' which explores part of this issue.

Here’s the problem.

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%.

Part of this is performance. No one wants to be part of a losing team.

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.

Is there also a policy related issue that regulars at DivThu will recognize?

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.

Here’s the problem: this will continue to be a festering, cancerous growth on the U.S. military until it is excised. It has been allowed to grow untreated for long enough.