🌊 The Army is Cool Again. Why?

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By Max Frost

For three years, the US military hasn’t been able to get enough people. 

In 2022 and 2023, the Army was 25% short of its recruiting goals – a cumulative shortage of around 30,000 people. It hit its goal last year, but only after dropping its target by 10,000.

The Navy missed its target in 2023. It met it in 2024 only after lowering its recruiting standards. 

The Air Force missed its target in 2024; the Army Reserve hasn’t met its target since 2016. 

Taken together, military recruitment has been in a crisis: Despite the US having twice as many people as it did at the end of the Second World War, women now being eligible, and the military being around 10% of its post-war size, the US can’t field enough people. For 30 years, its size has been shrinking – despite analysts warning that a major military conflict is nearer now than it has been in decades. 

But in December, all of a sudden, something happened: The Army posted its best recruitment numbers in 12 years. A month later, it posted its best number in 15 years.

The mainstream media simply didn’t report this news. 

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal have all written in-depth stories about the military recruitment crisis. Not one of them reported this. The New Yorker reported the opposite: An essay on February 3 was entitled, “The U.S. Military’s Recruiting Crisis.”

Meanwhile, President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and conservative media said the spike was clearly driven by the president – through his public patriotism, his promises to end DEI in the military, and his pledges to restore the military to a lethal war-fighting machine. 

But is that the full story? To find out, we spoke with a military officer who spends significant time with new recruits. Today’s deep-dive shares his insights and examines whether Trump really has solved the years-long recruitment crisis. 

This officer, who can’t be identified, provided the analytical framework for military recruitment: “A soldier has to be physically and mentally serviceable, willing, and in contact with someone who can furnish them with information and provide that gateway into the military. The confluence of that provides a recruit.”

While “recruitment has always been a difficult sell,” he said, it’s become particularly tough in recent decades because the “eligible population that is willing is getting smaller.”

“Willing” refers to people who want to join the military. “Eligible” refers to those who are physically, morally, and mentally able. Per the Army’s latest numbers, “71% of youth do not qualify for military service because of obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct, and aptitude.”

So a spike in recruiting can reflect two things: More people who are willing or more people who are able.

“The eligible population has probably become a bit smaller. The awareness of the Army has been the same for five years. So it seems the number of people who are willing has increased,” this soldier concluded.

Why would that be? 

While “it’s difficult to isolate a single variable,” he said, the trend is likely among 17-25-year-old high school grads. 

“Everything the military does is for them. The GI Bill, VA, upward mobility.”

So is it the attack on DEI?

He was skeptical: “The average soldier doesn’t experience that.” 

Nearly a dozen layers exist between the high-level DEI policies and new recruits. “Lower down we don’t notice this,” he said. “Tactically deployable units don’t have DEI policy statements and don’t have language that encapsulates that. I theoretically received an order to rescind DEI policies at my level but I don’t have that. The administration change at my level is hardly noticeable.”

What people do notice, he said, is a shift away from involvement in “pointless wars.” 

This soldier likened the situation in recent years to the post-Vietnam “identity crisis.” Most soldiers have “a negative perception of how the administrations handled the Global War on Terror,” he said. He added, “There’s a lot of scar tissue associated with unnecessary wars.”

Now, though, you have “language at the national level regarding boosting the strength of the military while the rhetoric is also avoidant to unnecessary conflict.” 

Trump’s “lack of willingness to commit soldiers to foreign soil” has resonated with his soldiers, he said. “Most people generally are against becoming decisively engaged in a distraction when we are training for large-scale combat operations with a peer adversary.” 

Many soldiers believe that Trump feels the same way, he said. 

Still, he said this needs to all be seen in context: The Army’s goal was to recruit 55,000 recruits in 2025. “That’s a vanishingly small figure in the national population, so a small swing in one demographic can substantially impact that…So it’s an interesting barometer for what’s going on in a society as a whole.” 

As yesterday’s story on the gender gap showed, there’s been a strong rightward shift among the 17-25-year-old male demographic overall. 

This soldier linked that to the improved recruitment numbers: “Is part of that due to a crisis of identity? Where does a man fit into society? People feel that they’re being told they’re oppressors. They don’t know their place in society.”

Is their place in the military?

There are other stories here, too. Military recruitment began ticking up in early 2024. That came after the Army made several changes in response to pressure over its missed recruiting goals. 

One initiative was the Future Soldier Prep Course, which the Army launched in 2022 and gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards so they can complete basic training.

Another change was marketing: In 2023, the Army revamped its outreach efforts, running more social media advertising and bringing back its 1980s “Be All You Can Be” slogan.

Others speculate a softening job market pushed more people to military service, while higher enlistment bonuses made service more attractive. 

Each of these factors may play a role, as does each political factor. Only time will tell if the worst of the Army’s recruitment crisis has passed. 

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading! Let us know what you think about today’s report: Why are more young people joining the US military now? What role do you think political messaging has played in the recruitment surge? Email us here!

In case you missed them, find our latest reports here:

• A look into the widening Gen Z gender partisan gap

• How Welfare Weakened Europe

• Inside America’s Booming Blood Business

• Reflecting on the strike that made modern America 

• The decline of evangelical influence in the White House

That’s all, see you tomorrow.

–Max and Max