The administration's wokeism is undermining our military.

For team Biden, is this a feature or a bug?

I’m confident that most of our readers are aware of how wokeness has infected the U.S. military. Under Joe Biden, the Pentagon ordered an unprecedented military-wide "stand down" of service members to root out alleged right-wing domestic extremists. In my view, this was just a stunt to further the Democrats’ baseless talking point that “our democracy” is in danger. Stunt or not, it wasted 5.8 million man hours.

In addition to its witch hunt, the Pentagon hired Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officers at salaries as high as $200,000 to waste more of our service members’ time while undercutting their morale. And it has rigidly enforced vaccine requirements, cutting off tens of thousands of service members from benefits, even when many have legitimate objections and, as healthy young adults, are at no serious risk from covid.

Furthermore, the Army has attempted to lower fitness standards in order to increase the number of women in combat, while the Navy is calling for less testing of officers in order to increase minority representation. The rot has spread to the service academies, which now teach radical doctrines like Critical Race Theory under the label of "diversity and inclusion, and in the case of the Air Force Academy, instructs cadets not to use the word "terrorist" and to avoid gender specific phrases.

Most of us have heard about much of this. But what many may not know — I didn’t — is the effect of all this wokeness on military recruiting.

Sen. Tom Cotton (Arkansas) and Rep. Ashley Hinson (Iowa) address this question in an op-ed for Fox News (from which the facts presented above are also drawn). They note:

Last year, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard all missed their recruitment goals by significant margins. This year, the recruitment crisis has continued with the Army expected to miss its recruitment objective by as many as 30,000 soldiers

The story is similar at the service academies:

The number of applications last year tumbl[ed] by 12 percent at West Point, over 20 percent at both Annapolis and the U.S. Air Force Academy, and by 25 percent at the Virginia Military Institute. During the same period, the number of college applicants nationwide rose over 20 percent.

Are these disturbing developments the effect of the military’s focus on wokeness? There’s good reason to believe they are.

Cotton and Hinson point to a survey which found that the number of Americans with a "great deal" of confidence in the military has plummeted from 70 percent in 2018, to 45 percent now. The largest decline in trust comes from Republicans, whose strong confidence fell from 87 percent to 53 percent – a disturbing 34 point drop.

As Cotton and Hinson observe, young conservatives are far more likely to serve in the military than their liberal counterparts. Thus, sharply declining faith in the military among Republicans has alarming implications for recruiting. It likely goes a long way towards explaining the failure to meet recruiting goals and the steep decline in service academy applications documented above.

Why would Republicans/conservatives lose faith in the military so dramatically in a period of only four years? Most likely because the Biden administration has politicized the armed forces in the ways described above, among others. As Cotton and Hinson say, preaching wokeness and political correctness in the military tends to alienate many cadets and potential recruits. And, of course it also takes time away from more important training that ensures our success on the battlefield.

Young Americans who buy the woke agenda aren’t likely to join the military no matter how woke it becomes. But the woke agenda is liable to turn off young Americans who would otherwise be inclined to enlist.

This seems clear. What’s unclear to me is whether Team Biden views the recruitment shortfall as an unfortunate byproduct of needed indoctrination of armed forces members or as a happy consequence of it — in other words, as a bug or a feature.

It’s fair, I believe, to suspect that for the civilians in the administration — and they’re the ones running the show — recruiting shortfalls aren’t genuinely lamented. As Sen. Cotton shows in his book Only the Strong, left-liberals distrust the military and believe that a powerful America is not a force for good in the world.

If one takes them at their word, they also believe the military, with all those “right-wing domestic terrorists,” is not a force for good here at home. As I said earlier, I don’t take left-liberals at their word on this, but do believe they don’t like the fact that there are so many conservatives in the ranks.

Why, then, would civilians in the administration fret if fewer Americans join the military? And, to the extent that it’s conservative young men who don’t join, why wouldn’t they be happy?

Ordinary Americans, by contrast, should be worried. As Cotton and Hinson conclude:

The U.S. military is a sacred and honorable institution. It protects us every single day from threats abroad – and in return, we must protect it from divisive politics at home.