Toward the end of the 1982 movie An Officer and a Gentleman, drill instructor Emil Foley challenges his recruit Zack Mayo to a fight, and brings him to his knees.
“You can quit now,” Foley, played by Lou Gossett Jr., tells the bloodied Mayo.
It’s one of many hurdles the recruit, played by Richard Gere, endures on his long road to becoming a Navy pilot. And while the scene is brutal to watch, the audience understands that the experience is—in a way—necessary for him ultimately to achieve success.
Today’s armed forces are different—with the Pentagon now faced with a predicament:
The military can’t meet its recruitment goals. Too many young people are too fat, do drugs, or have a criminal record. This has been a problem for years. It’s now approaching a crisis.
To address the recruitment shortfall, the military has reduced previous standards for entry, allowing men to be 6 percent fatter (and women, 8 percent). It is also trying hard to lure recruits by appealing to their self-interest, with a video of individual soldiers speaking to the camera, encouraging candidates to find “the power to discover, to redefine yourself, to improve yourself, to challenge yourself” and “to realize there’s more in you than you ever knew that you could do.” Recruits can also win up to $50,000 bonus money for enlisting.
But this strategy carries a big risk: young adults tend to be less loyal to organizations with lowered standards that target their personal motives. Study after study has shown as much.
As the University of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom has written, “If entering the group required a thumbs-up and a five-dollar entry fee, anyone could do it; it wouldn’t filter the dedicated from the slackers. But choosing to go through something humiliating or painful or disfiguring is an excellent costly signal, because only the truly devoted would want to do it.”
In other words, by lowering the barrier to entry, the military has opened itself up to more recruits like Jack Teixeira.
No one knows exactly why Teixeira, 21, the Massachusetts Air National Guard airman, allegedly leaked classified information about the CIA, exposing our intelligence on Russia, South Korea, Israel, and Ukraine. He is now cooling his heels in prison, charged with violating the Espionage Act for spilling state secrets on the gaming platform Discord.
The Tucker Carlson right and the Glenn Greenwald left have come to a similar conclusion: that Teixeira is a kind of folk hero. Greenwald recently stated that, much like Edward Snowden, Teixeira aimed to “undermine the agenda of these [intelligence] agencies and prove to the American people what the truth is.” And it’s hard to imagine any Republican ten years ago making the argument that Marjorie Taylor Greene did—that the “Biden regime” considers Teixeira an enemy of the state because he is “white, male, [C]hristian, and antiwar.” Regardless of their specific reasons, this bipartisan agreement that Teixeira should be applauded is emblematic of a broader lack of confidence in the American government and our military.
In recent years, support for the military has plummeted more than in any other American institution—with 45 percent of Americans voicing trust in the armed forces in 2021 versus 70 percent in 2018. This decline is almost entirely due to younger Americans: among those 18 to 44, confidence in all the branches of the military is in the low- to mid-40 percent range; for those 45 and up, it’s in the 80 percent range, according to a 2022 YouGov survey.
This decline in support for the military coincides with declining patriotism among young Americans: 40 percent of Gen Zers (those born from 1997 to 2012) believe the Founding Fathers are more accurately characterized as villains, not heroes, according to psychologist Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations.
You might think that the young Americans serving in the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines are immune to these opinions, that their decision to enlist implies a deeper bond with America and the military sworn to protect it.
You’d be wrong.
The evidence is in the advertising employed by the military itself. Recruitment campaigns seldom appeal to higher values, or to the history of the United States and its innumerable achievements. Rather, they appeal to the self. More and more young people are asking not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do for them.
I saw it myself when I enlisted in 2007. Even amid two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiters from all military branches boasted of enticing benefits, career advancement, and the chance to acquire new skills. There was scant talk of patriotism or service to the nation.
That said, I sensed at the time that service members were more patriotic than the general population.
But that gradually changed. In 2013, there was a huge outcry when the military suspended tuition assistance, which had previously covered 100 percent of college tuition fees for active duty members who took night classes. One of my coworkers proclaimed, “Why the fuck did I even join?” This was perplexing to me; we already had the GI Bill. For many people, that wasn’t enough.
By the time I left the military in 2015, I noticed a subtle difference among new members, who seemed most interested in pay raises, the chance to travel the world, and other benefits.
This has been building for a long time.
For both World Wars I and II, Uncle Sam famously pointed his finger at potential recruits and declared, “I want YOU for the U.S. Army.” The noble ideals of the time were ones of service and self-sacrifice.
Then, starting in 1980, in the wake of Vietnam, the Army shifted to “Be All You Can Be.” That lasted until 2001, when the slogan was updated to “Army of ONE.”
In January 2020, The New York Times reported on the Army’s latest marketing campaign, which spotlights its generous tuition benefits (especially alluring to young people crushed by student debt), and the opportunities that an Army stint would lead to in medicine and tech. Its messaging also stresses that most jobs are nowhere near a combat field, according to the Times.
In March 2023, the Army reinstated the slogan “Be All You Can Be.” (Although the Army did release a commercial, “Overcoming Obstacles,” that touts the military’s major historical achievements, it was yanked after its star, actor Jonathan Majors, was swept up in domestic abuse allegations.)
Nevertheless, the idea was (and is) clear: the goal of the military is not to defend something bigger and more consequential than any one person. It is to achieve yourself.
Self-interest might work in the short term to boost recruitment numbers, but it is misguided if the aim is to recruit properly dedicated people. The requirement to overcome self-interest is what cultivates loyalty and weeds out unserious candidates.
In his 2022 book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas argues that the number of difficult requirements imposed by a community correlates with a longer life span of the group. In short, the higher the price of membership, the longer the group survives. This is one reason why sports teams, fraternities, and militaries are hardest on their newest members. Imposed suffering builds bonds and filters out potentially disloyal members.
We shouldn’t be lulled into complacency by our current military dominance. As Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has noted, military power tells us only so much about how strong we are as a nation. Exhibit A: the Soviet Union, which, Gaddis observed, enjoyed its greatest military power at the very moment it was falling apart, in the early nineties. The problem, Gaddis explained, was the country had lost its sense of conviction or purpose—and the loyalty of its citizens.
If people no longer believe in the country, then its future is finished.
To state the obvious: we want more Zack Mayos and fewer Jack Teixeiras—more recruits who have to fight to fit into and rise up through the military, and fewer who are simply using the military to get ahead. More recruits who will strengthen the body politic, and fewer who will endanger it. (As we learned Friday, Teixeira had, in fact, been leaking classified documents to a wider audience and for longer than originally thought—stretching back to the start of the Ukraine war, in February 2022.)
Ultimately, the United States cannot rely on money and military power alone to sustain itself. Our nation’s strength depends on the unwavering commitment and unity of its people.
Rob Henderson is a columnist for The Free Press. Follow him on Twitter at @robkhenderson and subscribe to his Substack here.
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How exactly is the military supposed to appeal to a greater cause when, as this author himself points out, the country itself, down to its very founding, has been thouroughly villified?
I spoke in the recent article on "A Prisoner in China" on how I was a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) twelve years ago. In most countries where the Peace Corps operates, the vast majority of PCVs were and still are young, Ivy-league (or near to it) educated youth. Promotion of American exceptionalism was part of the job and wasn't considered an issue among the volunteers when I served in China. Flash forward ten years to 2020, and a group of Persons of Color (POC) who were part of the final group of PC China Volunteers wrote an open letter to the PC stating that the first two months of in-country training did not adequately train all PCVs to examine their own racism, and that the micro-aggressions they, the POCs, faced every day from other Volunteers made their already difficult job of representing America, a country in which they "already fear for [their] lives every day", all the more difficult. That's right, according to these PCVs, their biggest challenge in serving in China - a country that actually is ethnically supremicist and systematically racist, that actually is committing genocide - was being around the young, woke, Ivy-leage White volunteers, who were simply still just so racist that they, the POC Volunteers, could barely manage to do their job of teaching in China, a job that, because it was supposed to entail promoting American ideals, was just too traumatizing for them to continue doing unless the PC committed to incorporating CRT into every facet of PC training and operations.
The brainwashing is real and it is destroying everything.
As someone who is currently on recruiting duty for a branch of the Armed Forces, I agree with the author. The sales pitch is increasingly based on tangible benefits. But even the money, bonuses, etc are not enough to entice a lot of young people.
The historical “bread and butter” of recruits (young, conservative, patriotic) has dried up because they increasingly see the military as a politicized institution that falls to the whims of the current party in power. The military is used as a political pawn, a place to institute policies and hold it up as an example to the rest of the nation that your politics work.
These people aren’t idiots, and they see the shameful things we did to those who refused the COVID vaccine. We were extremely aggressive and sought Other Than Honorable discharges in the beginning and gave them RE-4 enlistment codes (not eligible for reenlistment). We softened up a little bit later, but the damage had already been done. And when politicians finally forced the reversal of this policy, and allowed those forcibly separated to come back in, they didn’t offer anything other than the removal of negative paperwork. No back pay after being forcibly removed from your livelihood over something that we are now admitting never made sense in the first place. These people have families to feed and we showed a complete disregard for them.
We offered “religious exemptions” to those who did not want the vaccine on moral grounds, but the responses were rubber stamped “No” without any real consideration. It required a General Officer’s approval or disapproval, and in all of my experience, I’ve never seen a General Officer sign anything in less than 48 hours. But very automatically and swiftly the responses came back without any real consideration. Everyone knew it was just a convenient way to give the appearance of fairness, even though they had already concluded in their mind was the conclusion was going to be.
People see the lack of interest in having an honest debate about current or prospective service members with gender dysphoria and whether a condition that is highly correlative with other mental health conditions like anxiety, suicidality, and depression is truly suitable for military service in a war zone. It requires constant and routine medication in order to maintain. We take a hard stance on all other mental health conditions and any recent medication use for ADHD, depression, anxiety is immediately disqualifying. I sincerely want people with gender dysphoria to get better, but a lot of people can’t square a condition like that with military service and our leaders show zero interest in having that conversation without the Democrat/Republican hyperbole.
I also remember the SECDEF mandated “extremist training” that softly accused service members of being extremists and white supremacists after January 6th. The implication was that an extremist could be among us, lurking around any corner, and we had to report suspicious behavior.
I find myself often wondering if the military is still the place for me in today’s climate. I’ve dedicated the last 10 years of my life to it, but the military I joined is no longer the same. I just want to defend my country if called upon, but I’m not interested in being someone’s political prop or pawn in the culture war.