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 1. 
 2. Military News


ARMY SEES SHARP DECLINE IN WHITE RECRUITS



Gen. James E. Rainey, head of Army Futures Command, swears in six new recruits
during a special Military Appreciation Day game featuring Minor League
Baseball's Round Rock Express in Round Rock, Texas, on April 30, 2023. (U.S.
Army Photo by Patrick Hunter)
Military.com | By Steve Beynon
Published January 10, 2024 at 4:25pm ET

The Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last
half decade, according to internal data reviewed by Military.com, a decline that
accounts for much of the service's historic recruitment slump that has become
the subject of increasing concern for Army leadership and Capitol Hill.

The shift in demographics for incoming recruits would be irrelevant to war
planners, except it coincides with an overall shortfall of about 10,000 recruits
for the Army in 2023 as the service missed its target of 65,000 new soldiers.
That deficit is straining the force as it has ramped up its presence in the
Pacific and Europe: A smaller Army is taking on a larger mission and training
workload than during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- leading to
soldiers being away from home now more than ever.




A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in
2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in
2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other
demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been
ups and downs from year to year.

Read Next: Inside the Pentagon's Failure to Notify the White House, Congress of
Defense Secretary's Hospitalization

In 2018, 56.4% of new recruits were categorized as white. In 2023, that number
had fallen to 44%. During that same five-year period, Black recruits have gone
from 20% to 24% of the pool, and Hispanic recruits have risen from 17% to 24%,
with both groups seeing largely flat recruiting totals but increasing as a
percentage of incoming soldiers as white recruiting has fallen.

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The rate at which white recruitment has fallen far outpaces nationwide
demographic shifts, data experts and Army officials interviewed by Military.com
noted. They don't see a single cause to the recruiting problem, but pointed to a
confluence of issues for Army recruiting, including partisan scrutiny of the
service, a growing obesity epidemic and an underfunded public education system.

Internally, some Army planners are alarmed over the data trends, but see it as a
minefield to navigate given increasing partisan attacks against the military for
its efforts to recruit and support a diverse force, according to interviews with
several service officials.

The Army declined Military.com's request to share its regional recruiting data,
which could show what specific parts of the country are struggling. Military.com
had seen internal Army numbers that suggested that the shift in demographics was
even more dramatic, but when presented with those figures, Army public affairs
officials insisted that they were wrong and provided updated statistics included
in this article, while blaming a system coding error.

The updated data provided by the Army did not break down recruit demographics by
both race and gender at the same time, meaning that it's unclear whether the
sharp decline is worse among white women or white men, or if the drop was the
same for both groups.


COLLAPSE OF MEN IN THE LABOR MARKET

Though the recruiting numbers reviewed by Military.com point to a stable gender
divide for incoming soldiers, 83% male in 2018 versus 82% in 2023, the
disproportionate number of men donning the uniform means that a disruption to
men seeking work in the U.S. can have a major impact on the military services.
That exact dynamic is at play, according to civilian experts, as men have been
disappearing from labor market statistics.

"Men have been in trouble in the workforce for two generations. The greatest
risk of being a labor dropout is being a native-born, low education, unmarried
guy," said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist who studies demographics at the
American Enterprise Institute. "Like with any other big historic change, it's
kind of hard to attribute to a single magic bullet."

According to Army officials, recruiting efforts are starting to broadly mimic
the trends in the private sector, though it's unclear why that would
particularly impact white recruiting.

"What we're seeing is a reflection of society; what we know less of is what is
driving all of these things," one Army official told Military.com. "There is no
widely accepted cause."

Part of those labor trends is men in their prime working age of 25 to 54 years
old detaching from the labor market for decades, though that age group is
slightly older than prime recruiting age.

The work rate for men in that age group has dropped from 94% in 1948 to 86% in
2023, according to Eberstadt's landmark study "Men Without Work." That group
accounts for roughly six million men who are unemployed and not looking for
work, which generally isn't captured by unemployment stats. It's a bit of a
mystery to data experts, with no single explanation like drug addiction or
women's increased participation in the workforce explaining the sharp drop.

Among other problems, opioid overdoses have increasingly pummeled the U.S. every
year, with 80,000 deaths in 2021 and about 75% of overdose victims being white
and many in their twenties, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family
Foundation.

And some Army officials interviewed by Military.com pointed to struggles by
recruits from the South to meet service standards, though there are no
indications that recruits from the South are disproportionately white. A 2018
study published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found
Southern recruits are 22% more likely to get injured in basic training and had
the lowest median levels of fitness compared to troops from other parts of the
country.

Nationally, the South has the highest prevalence of obesity, something
researchers have attributed to a slew of factors, including restrictions on
access to health care, high-quality fitness facilities and healthy food. Large
swaths of the South also have relatively low household incomes -- putting easy
access to fitness training and healthy foods even further out of reach.


PARTISAN ATTACKS

Another Army official pointed to partisan attacks from conservative lawmakers
and media, which has an overwhelmingly white audience. Those groups have used
the military as a partisan cudgel against the Biden administration, lambasting
the services for being "woke," or so preoccupied with liberal values that they
have abandoned their warfighting priorities. In most cases, those attacks have
zeroed in on the services being more inclusive for women, service members from
racial minority groups and LGBTQ+ troops.

"No, the young applicants don't care about this stuff. But the older people in
their life do who have a lot of influence ... parents, coaches, pastors," one
Army official told Military.com. "There's a level of prestige in parts of
conservative America with service that has degraded. Now, you can say you don't
want to join, for whatever reason, or bad-mouth the service without any cultural
guilt associated for the first time in those areas."

The Army has made a few passing attempts to court those cultural influencers in
hopes they might be more willing to recommend service to young Americans. This
includes a high-profile oath of enlistment ceremony on "Fox and Friends," an
oped in The Wall Street Journal from service secretaries pitching service, and a
return to a nostalgic recruiting slogan while heavily investing in advertising
on cable television.

Often, those "woke" critiques include few specifics. Right-wing pundits and
lawmakers have routinely blasted the Army for a 2022 recruiting ad, titled "The
Calling," featuring a real-life soldier who has two mothers and participated in
Pride events. The Army, in producing ads like that one, has seen data showing
that LGBTQ+ rights are considered a major priority among Gen Z, the demographic
that the service needs to court to build its ranks.

The service has since distanced itself from that ad.

"I don't know the genesis of it. Or why they. ... 'The Calling' was before me,"
Agnes Schaefer, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve
affairs, told lawmakers in December, referencing the ad when pressed on the
reasoning for it.


PARALLELS WITH CIVILIAN COLLEGE ENROLLMENTS

A similar demographic trend to what the Army is experiencing has been popping up
at colleges across the country. Between 2010 and 2021, white undergraduate and
graduate college enrollment rates fell from 43% to 38%, according to the most
recent federal data from the National Center for Education Statistics. That dip
coincided with fewer men enrolling, with male enrollment decreasing from 38% to
33% over the same period of time.

Higher education has also faced fierce partisan attacks from right-wing
lawmakers and partisan media, with critiques of the U.S. higher education system
being potent ways to gin up the Republican base.

Men now account for about 40% of undergraduate students, after seeing a steady
decline since the 1970s. That decline has run broadly parallel to a decline in
job opportunities for low-skill labor and manufacturing, meaning that as men are
becoming less educated as a demographic, the pool of jobs they qualify for
becomes increasingly shallow.

One of the key pitches for military service is numerous scholarships available
to service members during or after service, most notably the GI Bill -- broadly
seen on Capitol Hill as among the most successful federal programs. But if
college is becoming less relevant to white males, that pitch for service could
become less enticing moving forward.

Meanwhile, the Army is seeking structural changes in how it recruits, including
new recruiting career fields for soldiers aimed at putting the right talent into
boots to hopefully help fill the ranks. Even with recent attempts to boost its
recruiting force and slick new marketing ads, it likely faces an uphill battle
to overcome culture war issues that service leaders believe are, at a minimum,
exacerbating recruiting problems.

But the drop in white recruitment has baffled Army staff and isn't easily
explained by any one particular factor, and no parallel demographic trends in
the civilian sector are perfect comparisons.

Without proper context, some officials say, Army marketing efforts face a
difficult future as the service continues to face partisan culture war attacks
and the pool of eligible recruits continues to shrink.

"There are all sorts of things going on," Eberstadt said. "It's almost like a
naturally made Rorschach test."

Related: Army Opens New Warrant Officer Recruiting Roles as It Struggles to Fill
the Ranks

Story Continues
Related Topics: Military Headlines Army Recruit Minority Service Members


STEVE BEYNON



Steve Beynon is a reporter for Military.com based out of the Washington D.C.
area whose detailed investigations have covered urgent issues impacting
soldiers. Read Full Bio

© Copyright 2024 Military.com. All rights reserved. This article may not be
republished, rebroadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written
permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Military.com,
please submit your request here.
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