The United States military position is of increasing vulnerability as the Army, Navy, and Air Force all fail to meet their annual recruitment goals. It is no accident, for the situation dates back to the botched withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. It is hard for young men and women to want to join a service that was humiliated by an operation that left thousands of Afghans in the lurch—only to be executed after receiving the Taliban’s worthless promise of amnesty. Acts of this sort have long-term consequences, including precipitating what is now widely acknowledged to be an ongoing recruitment crisis for the military that could jeopardize the status of the all-volunteer force that has been a staple of American policy for fifty years. The shortage is fed by a general loss of confidence in the military by the American public—the number stands at 60 percent, the lowest in over two decades.

There are, as ever, multiple innocent explanations for the shifts in supply and demand, so the now-chronic shortages can be attributed in part to other socioeconomic factors beyond the ability of the military to recruit. The low unemployment rate offers potential recruits an enlarged set of nonmilitary options. A second factor is the apparent increase in parental pressure to attend college before settling on a career, which reduces the supply for military positions. There are additional difficulties on the supply side. High on this list are the declining fitness of potential recruits, who grapple in increasing numbers with obesity, drugs, and criminal records. This effect is then compounded by a reduced willingness to serve. It is possible of course to increase the number of recruits by lowering the standards for enlistment, as is being done, but only at the cost of a likely reduction in the performance levels of the military services. And it is also possible to sweeten the pot for potential recruits by offering them signing bonuses of up to $50,000, which, however necessary, counts as an open admission that all is not well within the system.

These alternative explanations for faltering recruitment do not directly point a finger at the military and how it conducts its operations. But government policies have helped to distort military priorities. There is a real sense that the budget cuts for the military are great enough that they will harm overall preparedness, with shortages in new equipment, a higher level of repairs, and extended tours of duty to offset shortages in equipment and personnel. Beyond that, the Biden administration is well-known for its fierce (and misguided) commitment to take control of global warming, which it regards as a “clear and present danger” to the United States. This devotion has the administration lurching toward declaring the climate situation some kind of national emergency by pointing to the recent disaster in Maui, even as it becomes blindingly clear that massive mismanagement of the fire area by both the government and the public utilities suggests a complete and inexcusable failure to remove vast accumulations of dry grass. That same fixation describes the Department of Defense with its overwrought commitment to energy “resilience,” which in all likelihood will further impair the overall military preparedness to respond to the immediate threats that confront the United States everywhere from the Middle East to Ukraine and the China Sea. Who wants to join a loser?