A precipitous decline in white recruits across every branch of the military since 2018 is fueling a "recruiting crisis" considered the "worst in the history" by one advocacy group, the Daily Caller reported Tuesday.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force missed their target numbers by large margins for fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30. Industry analysts, citing the data, say the decline of white recruits "is almost entirely responsible for the recruiting crisis," Will Thibeau, director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute, told the Daily Caller.
The data, according to the Daily Caller:
– Army: white recruits went from 44,042 (56.4% of total) in FY2018 to 25,070 (44%) in FY2023;
– Air Force: white recruits went from 21,593 (72.4% of total) in FY2018 to 15,068 (62.9%) in FY2023;
– Navy: white recruits went from 24,343 in FY2018 to 18,205 in FY2023;
– Marine Corps: white recruits went from 21,455 (58% of total) in FY2018 to 14,287 (43%) in FY2023.
Black, Hispanic, and Asian recruits increased across the same services, in varying degrees, in that same five-year time frame, but not enough to offset the decline in white recruiting, according to the report.
"This is a huge blow as the recruiting crisis is the worst in the history of the all-volunteer force," Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at Heritage, told the Daily Caller.
The debate among industry experts is, why the significant drop off in white recruits?
An Air Force spokesperson called the factors "complex and multifaceted." There is "no widely accepted cause," the Army told Military.com last month.
But then there's this:
"Fewer white Americans see the military as a righteous way to serve their country, but it is readily apparent the military is trying to recruit fewer white Americans in order to meet various policies of race composition in place throughout the Armed Forces. For every diversity objective, there is an imperative to reduce the proportion of white recruits. Since 2018, that's exactly what has happened," Thibeau told the Daily Caller.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agrees and has been outspoken about the Biden administration's woke policies infecting the military.
"They have to get politics out of the military," Tuberville told Newsmax last month. "We can't recruit hardly anybody. These kids, especially Southern kids, not race, but Southern Christian kids usually make up most of the military in the country, especially the Army. They're not joining, but I don't think they [Democrats] want them. I don't think they want them in the military.
"I think they just [say] 'Hey, stay out of it. We want people that will follow our line of wokeism.'"