Devastating Military Recruitment in 2024

The United States military is a product. That is something that is hard for Baby Boomers and most GenXers to comprehend, because they see the military as a constitutionally enshrined (and constricted) governmental service. That is a legacy of a pre-volunteer military mindset coupled with 1980s nostalgia. While it is true – the military’s core function is supposed to be the defense of these United States – the “employee body” is comprised of young volunteers and it requires a fresh crop of recruits annually to survive in its present form. Correspondingly, this places the military into a unique position of competing with alternatives for that said crop of recruits. In essence, the Department of Defense must find ways to make itself the more appealing alternative to its top competitor – universities. In this regard, U.S. military recruitment is like any other product as it pertains to marketing and advertising.

To remain relevant, the military must continue to attract “consumers”: impressionable 18 – 24-year-old young adults, primarily males. It is failing. This is an incredible opportunity for our movement.

The purpose of this article is not intended to help the U.S. military. It is intended to further exacerbate that failure. Our most important mission is to break a degenerate United States in half, such that a Free and Independent Dixie can arise from the ashes of that former empire. To do so, the easiest way we can target and accelerate the collapse of the U.S. is through exploiting the option likely to have the greatest impact on the current regime in power. Devastating military recruitment is the most readily available, legal opportunity presented to us.

A core component of the failing ability of the U.S. military to recruit in the 21^st Century is that the U.S. military has a marketing problem. That is not to say that it has an advertising problem – in business sciences, the two are separate disciplines. The core of marketing is data collection and subsequent quantitative analysis related to consumer insight. The result of those analytics should dictate the methods used to attract consumers (e.g., advertisements, promotions, etc.). Whether or not the military understands that which drives its consumer is debatable. Regardless, it is clear that even if the military rank and file within the recruiting commands of the various services understand what helps and harms recruitment, the policy directives of both civilian and senior military leadership within the Department of Defense run in direct opposition to the needs of recruitment.

Although they will never admit it, the fact is, the U.S. military has become a social justice petri dish. That is not unique to Presidents Obama or Biden. Many of the social justice elements that are deeply interwoven into the modern military’s operating culture went into hyperdrive throughout a Trump Administration that never really understood the nature of a military brass that simply ignored Trump’s sporadic civilian leaders and ham-fisted approach to policy. That which senior leaders liked, they embraced. That which senior leaders did not like, they placed on the back burner – betting there would be no second term for the Trump Administration. The cumulative result will be sixteen years of a constant leftwing orbital shift that is way out of touch with ordinary Americans. For recruiting commands that have no power over strategic policy, they have been forced to attempt to override a damaged brand reputation with greater incentives, such as more money for college and/or larger recruitment bonuses. Decades of marketing research, however, has proven that incentives do not work when the brand’s reputation is damaged, and the damage is not addressed. In effect, you can offer coupons for free cheeseburgers, but if the reputation of those cheeseburgers is that they give the consumer E.coli, and no one has addressed the E.coli issue, then the coupons will go unused. This is especially true if there are alternatives to be had, a lesson that Bud Light learned. For the military, the alternative is often college.

In an environment whereby student loans are easily obtained and there are no consequences to non-payment of those loans (except a bad credit score), the U.S. military has had to find other ways to inspire voluntary enrollment. After all, one of the key benefits of joining the military was a “free” or significantly subsidized college education. From the G.I. Bill to the Army College Fund to various state university programs that offer free veteran education, joining the military was a way in which lower-to-middle income children could advance their socioeconomic status through higher education. With subsidized loans and the perennial promise of some kind of mass student debt forgiveness, the higher education benefit simply does not have the same appeal it had in the 1950s – 1990s. That makes one coupon down.

The alternative to the military higher education message was that of “job skills.” It is not an accident that the elimination of technical education programs in the United States occurred at about the same time as the introduction of the all-volunteer military. The military-industrial complex is its own beast with its own needs. Never underestimate the power of self-serving interests, even when those interests dovetail with the interests of other actors or elements.

Returning to the topic, if you were an early twenty-something who joined the military with a reasonable Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test score, you could learn a number of lifelong, professional skills, such as data entry, plumbing, electrical work, aircraft maintenance, etc. Forgoing college and joining the military provided an opportunity for the less academically inclined to emerge with a career or journeyman status within the trades. Better yet, such a tradesman had the potential to exit the Army with a significant bonus and no student debt – placing him financially well ahead of his peers. However, the messaging of the military has largely moved away from its previous blue-collar marketing for a number of reasons, but the short answer is presumed interests. Young people do not seem particularly interested in learning “dirty” labor skills. Thus, another coupon down.

Finally, one of the key drivers of military recruitment was an appeal to patriotism. This was the bread and butter of the military for decades. Impressionable young men – especially Southern White men – were driven to join a military that they saw as honorable. They joined to defend the Constitution and these United States. To these young men, who often derived from families comprised of an enlisted lineage, the pinnacle of their lives was their willingness to die in battle to defend against enemies foreign and domestic. But patriotism is not that cool anymore for a myriad of reasons. Unlike the incentive gimmicks of college funds and signing bonuses, this driver is not an incentive built by recruiting commands, but one that is built from within a broader society. Not only is that crumbling outside of the military, but senior level policy makers have also targeted those few who would likely join the U.S. military for patriotic reasons.

Potential black recruits have been fed a steady diet of anti-American vitriol for the last five decades. It has gone into hyper-drive since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement approximately ten years ago. Everything about the United States has been portrayed as an outgrowth of White supremacy and the protection of those institutions and principles – to include the Constitution – are now seen as elements of systemic White imperialism or reactive fragility. Why would anyone volunteer to join a military designed to perpetuate their oppression? Even more importantly, why would anyone join a military whereby the black leaders within the military have complained that the institution is racist to the point whereby they felt personal harm? After all, if the racist military can impede the promotion of an educated officer (soon to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), how can a young black male with a high school diploma expect to receive fair treatment? The cumulative impact of anti-American, social justice rhetoric amplified by messaging from senior military officers of color will suppress recruitment.

More importantly, however, is the cumulative impact of anti-White and anti-Christian rhetoric from the United States government, media, academia, and elected political leaders. Non-Hispanic, black citizens account for approximately 12% of the population, and they are shrinking rapidly as a demographic cohort. The recruitment demographic that is most critical to U.S. military recruitment is the much larger pool of White teenagers and early-twenty-somethings. At present, Non-Hispanic Whites constitute approximately 65% of the total American population. That, too, is shrinking rapidly. Still, nearly 56% of potential recruits are Non-Hispanic Whites and the vitriol levied against them has divorced them from a United States that not only openly hates them for being White, but they are also no longer actively recruited.

If you look at current recruitment content, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) push has effectively forced White males out of recruiting content. There is almost no representation of young White males in advertisements any longer. Long gone are the Marine Corps videos of “The Few. The Proud. The Marines.” Rather, Marine Corps recruiting attempted to embrace popular terminology of the political Right by appealing to “nation,” while depicting everyone other than Whites as part of that nation. The messaging from the United States military has been crystal clear: we do not want White recruits. Unironically, groups like “Patriot Front” have done a far better job enticing White teenagers to equate patriotism and nation to race versus the military’s ham-fisted attempts at DEI inspired anti-racist/anti-White marketing strategies centering “nation” as a post-White America.

The military’s anti-White shift in advertising may have been justified if the military still had White veterans imploring their White children to join the military. That is no longer happening. Veterans are not only far more conservative as a group (that may change in the future), but they are also statistically more politically engaged then the average American. Consequently, while average American citizens may be less likely to notice the definitively anti-White vitriol of the modern military, White veterans are speaking openly about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the politically weaponized Covid vaccine to their children. This is all having a suppressing effect on recruitment potential.

The cumulative impact of the American recruiting landscape is further exacerbated by a U.S. military that spends a lot of money on urban marketing professionals to assist its recruiting endeavors. Contrary to popular beliefs, the vast majority of military service members are not country boys. While it is true, there are disproportionately more rural and exurban recruits then urban ones due to sheer volume (i.e., there are less rural citizens then urban ones), the happy hunting ground of American military recruiting is found in the suburban pockets that surround larger cities, especially in the South and Midwest. The U.S. military needs successful marketing campaigns that target the suburbs of Cleveland, Dallas, St. Louis, and Nashville. The problem is that most of the major marketing firms have very little insight into these markets. They are generally geared toward nationalized campaigns with a high focus on urban and major market (i.e., Los Angeles, New York, Chicago) consumption. That is a problem for the U.S. military, but it gets worse.

At the exact same time that urban based marketing professionals are guiding military advertising to achieve recruitment goals, the U.S. military is engaged in a massive social justice experiment. Even if the social justice experiment is minimal, it does not matter. It has an immediate impact on perception because social justice initiatives are inherently unstoppable and always have a snowball-avalanche effect. If the military is embracing CRT – which it is – this will only reinforce the importance of social justice marketing to their service providers – the advertising community – who will seek marketing biases to justify advertising campaigns that comport with the views of decision makers. In other words, if senior military leaders want confirmation bias in marketing data, marketing professionals will give them confirmation bias. The snowball (i.e., policy du jour) is compounded by more snow added to the snowball (i.e., manufactured marketing data), until such time that the messaging begins to accumulate an out of control, unsustainable messaging campaign that wrecks its target market like an avalanche. Here is where this gets great for us.

Despite mountains of anecdotal assertions that Generation Z (born between 1997 – 2012) are the most liberal demographic cohort in generations, polling data has shown something very different. Whereas it is true, the generation is more broadly left of center, that is because females are overrepresented in almost every poll that has been conducted. When “Zoomer” males are polled and analyzed, they turn out to be one of the most hard-right generations ever analyzed. In effect, females are becoming more leftwing, males are becoming more rightwing. We can delve into the reasons why young males are becoming more rightwing, but that will have to be a topic for another article. More important is how this impacts U.S. military recruitment because it exemplifies the cumulative impact of leftwing policy decisions on recruiting and gives our movement incredible opportunities.

Policy makers will often encourage the promotion of DEI pronouncements and excuse these promotions as part of some cool attempt to connect with young Americans. The problem is that they are not connecting with young Americans. They are much like the old guy trying to be hip. They are actually pushing them away. A case in point would be the horribly mocked cartoon commercial of a young female Army recruit with two lesbian mothers out of San Francisco. Mocking did not originate from GenXers (the other hard-right demographic that happens to be the parents of GenZers). Mocking originated from Zoomers who found the commercial cringy and pathetic. Within minutes of release, the ridiculously leftist cultural mishmash was compared to Chinese and Russian recruitment videos featuring hardened men training constantly. Even if the military put out more inspiring promotional material, no one remembers those commercials. They remember the woke social justice warrior recruit who is now a junior NCO impacting promotion decisions.

Demographic and generational voting trends provide even more unique data because they show a hardening along fault lines. One comprehensive data set on GenZ voting was conducted by Murmuration, with contributions from SocialSphere and The Walton Family Foundation. The data set, conducted in December 2022 shortly after the midterm election, showed a sharp division built into the data. The number of Evangelical Christians rose among GenZers, while mainstream Protestantism fell. As a whole, however, faith did not take that much of a dip overall. It dropped four percentage points as a self-identifier, which is not nearly as precipitous a drop as anecdotally reported in mainstream media outlets. More striking was the fact that 75% of GenZers considered faith as “Very Important” or “Somewhat Important” to their own life. That was nearly identical to adults over the age of 26, who stated it was 77% very or somewhat important. Noting that GenZ is young and people tend to grow more religious as they get older, this is indicative of a generation that is more conservative than thought. But it gets better for the Dissident Right.

Sexual identification has clearly changed. Only 75% of respondents claimed to be heterosexual versus 92% of older cohort respondents. The largest difference was in the self-identified “bisexual” category, that rose 300% (from 3% to 9%). Self-identified “gays” accounted for only 2% and lesbians stayed at 1%. The vast majority who did not identify as heterosexual answered, “None of the Above,” “I Don’t Know,” “Prefer Not to Say,” or “Refused.” The largest overall category increase was a sexual self-identifier entitled “queer” – of which 4% claimed some label within a catchall category that ran a broad gamut from so-called pansexual to asexual. In other words, the Far Right incel who has never had sex could easily find himself in a sexual category that is lionized by the political Left. The reason this is important is because modern identitarian discourse has tried to weaponize sexuality as a tool for political exploitation. The U.S. military has embraced this whole heartedly, as evidenced by their over-the-top promotion of LGBT propaganda during so-called Pride Month. What this study tells me is something very different. Generation Z – the U.S. military’s core recruitment demographic – is hardening on one side of the political spectrum or the other, while the increasingly smaller middle is refusing to give a clue as to how they feel about certain societal topics.

The beauty of this kind of research is that it enables the Dissident Right, and especially Southern Nationalists, to target the elements of GenZ that are more likely to be inclined toward military recruitment in ways that make military recruitment undesirable for the hardening 50% of GenZ. In essence, we do not have to worry about transgenders, homosexuals, or left leaning females – all of which the major recruiting commands are required by force of policy to concentrate upon. With the exception of leftwing females, the outlier population cohorts are not growing to any meaningful effect. They are certainly not growing at replacement levels whereby the military can offset heterosexual White Christian males with sexually amorphous atheists. We can focus on the majority of potential recruitment pools while recruitment commands are forced to concentrate on minority pockets of the population.

More importantly, the other larger recruitment pools – such as Hispanic or black males – may not appreciate being tied to the sexually amorphous atheists that the military is now required to elevate. Whereas recent racially motivated cultural antagonisms have them hating White males, that does not mean young black males will be drawn to a military that is pro-homosexual simply because it deters White males. The same can be said for Hispanics.

We simply need to focus our messaging like a laser beam on two groups: GenZ White Christian males and GenX veterans. Our strategy should hyper-inflate perceptions that the military is anti-Christian, anti-White, and homosexual. While these are substantive facts – the military is anti-Christian, anti-White, and disproportionately homosexual – these need to be the three most important elements of social media engagement. Memes, videos, and other entertaining methods of engagement should serve to educate GenZ on various anti-White and pro-LGBT military initiatives. They need to be truthful, deriving messaging from actual military policy. In this regard, recruitment commands cannot compete with our ability to remain nimble and factual with our communications objectives.

Meanwhile, for Generation X veterans – the various recruiting commands’ force multiplier within the population – the message has to power down on the fact that this is “not Reagan’s military anymore.” The most important message to GenX veterans is the following: Do you know the consequences of a dishonorable discharge? Do you really want your White Christian son to join a U.S. military in which he can find himself with a dishonorable discharge on the basis of an accusation of racism, sexism, genderism? Even if he escapes that fate – what are his chances for promotion in a military that now embraces Critical Race Theory as the core of its senior leadership operating culture? By appealing to both the nostalgia of GenX for a once pro-American society, as well as its sacrosanct belief in meritocracy over “equity,” we can dismantle the desire of veterans to promote military service to their sons. This gets more poignant when we consider the myriad of anti-Southern initiatives led by the current U.S. military.

In an environment whereby the U.S. military is renaming bases and tearing down monuments to Southerners – to include peace monuments at cemeteries – one simply needs to hammer home the innate animosity toward Southerners held by the current Department of Defense. Ask the following of a GenX veteran from the South: Do you honestly believe that your son with a Southern drawl will get a fair shake in a military that today openly hates Southerners and the South? The minute he says, “y’all,” he is a marked man. Again, appealing to nostalgia, meritocracy, and in this case, indignation, has to be the core of our messaging aimed at GenX.

This is a golden opportunity for Southern Nationalists. Military recruitment continues to fall year-over-year. Senior military leadership and civilian policy makers are incapable of looking beyond their ideological blinders to address perceptions of anti-White bias. The recruiting commands are powerless. They are forced to work within the restrictive confines of policies made outside of their control. Marketing companies that serve the military are simply doing their best to keep a client, reinforcing policy biases with disastrous recruiting results.

The U.S. military is on the ropes – ropes of their own making. It is time we do in 2024 what we were not able to do in 1865: finish them.