The 1984 movie The Last Starfighter focused on a lonely teenage boy, Alex, whose only real pleasure was found in playing a video game named “Starfighter.” Alex excelled at it, beating every level of challenge the game threw at him.

What Alex didn’t know was that the game was broadcasting his success to another planet. Then the game’s creator, Centauri, shows up in the persona of Robert Preston, who was recreating his genial con man role from The Music Man. Centauri soon persuades Alex to return to Centauri’s home planet, where he is teamed up with a lizard-like pilot named Grig. The two subsequently win the ultimate battle with the bad guys. Alex becomes an interplanetary hero, and all ends well.

There’s no good reason for mentioning that movie except for the Air Force’s decision to team up with the real smart guys at the nonprofit MITRE Corporation to conduct a video game competition that, while unlikely to be broadcast to other planets, serves both as a recruiting gimmick and as a way to possibly identify new talent.

It’s called “GameX: Mission Generation Under Attack.” As a Washington Examiner story reported, “Participants will compete in the game Drone Guardians, which requires users to make ‘critical mission decisions’ to defend ‘deployed locations’ from ‘multi-domain attacks’ while continuing fighter aircraft missions.” According to a MITRE statement referenced by the Examiner, “The game requires a mix of first-person shooter, strategy, and puzzle-solving skills for players to succeed.”

The game will require strategic and tactical decisions, such as whether it would be more important at a given moment to launch drones and fighters or defend a base. MITRE, a spin-off of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will run the games.

As recruiting gimmicks go, this is a very smart one. Teens and college students who play might be brought to see that joining the Air Force or the U.S. Space Force (a part of the Air Force) would be an attractive beginning of a career or even an entire career. More importantly, the game could help identify people who could be the future leaders of the Air Force.

The Air Force, like all of our military services, is suffering big shortfalls in recruitment. The Air Force had a recruiting goal of about 27,000 for 2023 and is falling about 10 percent short.

The reasons for the shortfall are common among the services. Many young people don’t want to risk their lives defending our nation. More than that, many recruits who apply don’t meet the services’ physical fitness standards. Simply put, too many young men and women are too fat to qualify.

Perhaps more importantly, the “wokeness” being forced on the military members by the Biden administration drives many to conclude — correctly — that our services aren’t a culture that young people want to join. Most of the youngsters who would want to join are either college students or others motivated by family tradition or simple patriotic feeling. Many want to get a career boost from serving, but our political mess discourages them. Some see financial aid in college scholarships or the GI Bill, which pays future college costs.

Wokeness turns them off. They see, for example, service members required to participate in “privilege walks” where people who come from “privileged” families — those whose fathers are present, or those not from families who didn’t receive welfare — are told to take a step forward, leaving others behind. This practice is divisive because it leads to resentment among the troops. And that’s not half of the wokeness being imposed on our military.

The young folks we really want in the military are those who are proud of our country and want to help defend it. Some can gain that pride by being a part of something larger than themselves. But pride in our country and its military are something of the past.

I spent a great four years in the Air Force and have been around the some of the greatest people our country produces ever since. I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed in for my whole career. Nevetheless, I couldn’t recommend military services to anyone at this point.

It will probably take a generation or more to rid our military of the “leaders” who have imposed wokeness on our military even if we began today. But Joe Biden and his Pentagon are not starting that process; they’re continuing to impose wokeness on every military member. They are destroying the readiness and lethality of our forces from within.

As this column has stated repeatedly, the ONLY things that military leaders should concern themselves with are the readiness and lethality of the forces they command.

Those concerns are, in the Biden era, also things of the past. Biden has made our forces vastly weaker than they should be, and not only because of the wokeness he has forced on the military.

Biden has upended our entire vision of success. The reason people succeed in what they do depends on their intelligence, strength, and speed. Those who are smarter, stronger, and faster should succeed more than those who aren’t, but Biden’s model of success is someone like Kamala Harris, who lacks all of those attributes, as Biden does.

Our next president can’t help but do better than Biden has, unless it’s someone like Harris. He or she can rid the military of wokeness, improve our diplomacy (which Biden and Tony Blinken have dumbed down), and make America respected again in the world. Right now, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Ayatollah Khamenei must be enjoying the show and wondering what Biden can do next to weaken us.