President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promised to restore the “warfighting” ethos to the military and now warfighters are signing up in droves to serve our country.
The Army announced Tuesday that it has surpassed its recruitment targets “with more than 61,000 future soldiers—a full four months before the end of the fiscal year.”
Fox News reported on how this represents a huge turnaround for recruitment that was in a state of crisis until very recently.
“This year’s goal is more than 10% higher than the 55,000 recruits targeted in fiscal 2024, demonstrating a surge in interest and enthusiasm for Army service,” Fox said. “Recent recruiting momentum has seen average contracts per day exceeding last year’s levels by as much as 56% during the same period.”
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll explained in the Wall Street Journal why he’s so proud of these numbers and why Americans should be too. He attributed the surge to “a resurgence of pride” in our country.
“Young Americans are more inspired by purpose and patriotism—ready to stand up for our values and protect our freedoms. They’re stepping up during a time of global uncertainty and complex threats,” he wrote.
The news is certainly a huge deal and mirrors similar recruitment increases across the armed services. It marks the first time since 2014 that the Army met its recruitment numbers early. U.S. military recruitment had been in the doldrums for a decade, reaching crisis levels under the Biden administration. This while major conflicts were erupting around the globe and President Joe Biden seemed likely to sleepwalk the nation into more than what the U.S. was prepared for.
The Biden administration leaned heavily into DEI with its messaging and recruitment pitches. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Biden, once boasted to the Senate Arms Service Committee that the Defense Department “expended 5,359,311-man hours for Secretary [Lloyd] Austin’s extremism standdown and an additional 529,711-man hours for DEI-specific training.”
While that was happening, recruitment was flatlining among the various diverse groups the administration said it wanted and was collapsing with white men. It didn’t help that the administration was purging the military of soldiers who refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
But Trump and Hegseth insisted that they were going to get DEI out of the military, focus on warfighting, listen to the common soldier, bring back personnel purged by the vaccine mandates, and get rid of worse than useless, woke senior commanders.
The long-term effects of these moves have yet to fully play out, but it’s hard to deny that this administration is having tremendous success on the recruitment and retention front.
To no surprise, most legacy, corporate media outlets have tried to downplay the recruiting surge, insisting over and over that the numbers were starting to go up in 2024 and that the change has nothing, NOTHING to do with the president and the reduction of military wokeness.
But the surge in recruitment is about as baffling and mysterious as the sudden end to the border crisis as soon as Trump replaced Biden.
Is it so shocking that Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, brought in part by the surge in young men also brought in a surge of those same young men who see opportunities in the military they didn’t see before?
It isn’t just about getting rid of the DEI mindset as important as that is. The administration has frequently noted that while the military’s focus will now be on “warfighting,” it will avoid open-ended wars with vague goals that put our people in harm’s way.
“We ought to be cautious in deciding to throw a punch, but when we throw a punch, we throw a punch hard, and we do it decisively,” Vice President JD Vance, who served in the Marine Corps, said in a commencement speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in May.
So, whatever the corporate media wants to say, it’s clear that Trump has put a focus on rebuilding the health and confidence of the military, and so far, those efforts are paying off.
Maybe the Army should throw a big parade on their 250th birthday to celebrate? Oh wait, they are in Washington, D.C.
No surprise that the same media that covered up for Biden can’t allow itself to give credit to the Trump administration for the recruitment news is ready to heap scorn on the Army’s parade too. That’s fine. Nobody is listening to them anyway.