The Department of Defense's stated mission is to provide "the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security."
Many critics and even some current U.S. military personnel say that mission is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain because the woke brass at the Pentagon is intentionally weakening America's fighting forces.
In fact, all branches of the military are struggling, and likely won't meet, their recruitment goals for Fiscal Year 2022. It will likely be the worst recruiting year for the American military since it went to an all-volunteer force in 1973.
“They happily encourage mandated vaccines, back the transgender issue, and speak out in opposition to the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to Roe v. Wade — all of which are very political,” a current service member who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told The Epoch Times.
“We now have a Department of Defense that has taken various political positions that are very much opposed to the heart of America,” the service member, identified only as an active-duty Army soldier with over 15 years of service, said. “Much of America is missing the fact that the Army is intentionally kicking people out in a precarious way that it knows is unnecessary, because the data shows that it’s unnecessary.”
The soldier said he is under the impression that “our military is intentionally being weakened.”
Several members of Congress last month noted that all U.S. military branches have not met their recruitment goals for Fiscal Year 2022.
"We are on the cusp of a military recruiting crisis," Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher told Politico. "When Republicans take control of Congress in a few months, averting the recruiting crisis will be a top priority."
Over the next two years, the U.S. Army is expected to fall nearly 40,000 troops short of its recruitment goals, The Epoch Times reported.
"Fiscal year 2022 is expected to miss the mark by 10,000 troops, while the number in fiscal year 2023 could reach 28,000. These figures mean that this year is on track to be the Army’s worst recruiting year in almost 50 years," the report said. "The Army plans to circumvent the problem by offering $1 billion for its recruiting program and placing more emphasis on the use of its reserve units."
The size of battalions is shrinking, the Army soldier told The Epoch Times, adding that “some are less than two-thirds of where they need to be,” and many of those who remain are not “usable deployables.”
Also last month, the Army cut roughly 60,000 National Guard and Reserves members from pay and benefits for refusing to take the Covid vaccine, even as more than 30% of its recruitment slots sat unfilled.
Thomas Spoehr, director of the Center for National Defense, wrote for the Heritage Foundation last month: "This is not an academic problem. A recruiting shortfall translates directly to understrength units with less combat capability. Without the necessary numbers of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Space Force guardians, the most technologically advanced equipment is useless. Unless this trajectory is corrected, U.S. combat units will have diminished strength at a time when the world is increasingly presenting challenges to U.S. interests.
"Both the Administration’s and Congress’s reaction to this situation has been underwhelming and unequal to the size of the challenge."
Maj. Paul Lewis (a pseudonym), an expert on personnel retention matters within the Marine Corps, told The Epoch Times that U.S. military readiness has been impacted in the past few years by “a toxic combination of poor leadership and the politicization of the military.” He said there has been “a steady reduction in readiness due primarily to reckless policies that have eroded the trust of the rank and file service-members.”
“It really came to light in the wake of COVID when service members began to see that senior leaders chose to put politics ahead of military readiness,” Lewis said. “Senior officers and senior civilian executives have run the military into the ground in the name of career stability and progression instead of keeping faith with Marines and their families.”
Potential recruits are not signing up to serve in the Marine Corps as they have in previous years, and Lewis attributes this to “a rejection of the bureaucratic leadership.” For American citizens to choose to serve in the “all-volunteer force,” he states, “they want to be able to trust that their leadership has their best interest at heart, and that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore.”
According to Lewis, this erosion of trust can be “manifested in the military loss in Afghanistan as well as how COVID vaccine mandates have been enforced in a draconian and illegal manner,” and this according to him has led to “a complete loss of trust and confidence in the leadership.”
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