Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats have offered grave concerns of "military readiness" in the face of the pro-life strategy of Tommy Tuberville. The Republican senator from Alabama has become a hot-button news topic after placing "holds" on military promotions in an effort to force the Department of Defense to reverse its abortion access for personnel and other woke agenda items.
Now a retired Army general and former Delta Force commander says the current state of military readiness is a grave threat to national security – and it has nothing to do with colonels trying to become generals. Gen. Jerry Boykin points out the military has missed recruiting goals by more than 25,000 troops over the last two years, which has given the U.S. its smallest fight force since the early days of World War II.
Has the inability to attract recruits jeopardized national security?
"Oh, there's no question about that," Boykin said on Washington Watch Wednesday. "All you have to do is look at what's happening with Russia, Iran, North Korea. As they are building up their forces and gaining strength – the kind of strength they will need in a war against America, which is their primary target – we ought to look at ourselves and ask, 'Are we keeping up with them, at least?' … and the answer is we are not."
Army officials announced on Tuesday that 55,000 recruits have enlisted, down 10,000 from its goal of 65,000.
Army Secretary Christine Wormuth this week announced several recruiting reforms. Among them are:
- Establishing new specialized enlisted and warrant officer recruiting career fields that will replace the existing 79R MOS and eventually abolish involuntary recruiting assignments.
- Formally increasing recruiters' mandate to woo prospective soldiers with college education, due to the shrinking proportion of workforce members who have only a high school education.
- Creating an experimentation directorate within the Recruiting Command that is isolated from current-year production pressure.
- Integrating effective data analysis to support recruiting policy decisions after the study group found the service has failed to verify whether historical changes were effective.
- Reassigning Recruiting Command to report directlyto Wormuth, and raising its commanding general rank to a three-star level and extending the command tour length to four years.
- Reassigning the Army Enterprise Marketing Office to report to Recruiting Command.
Announced reforms not likely to handle the problem
None of that appears to address what Boykin believes are the real recruiting problems.
"We are doing things that have nothing to do with preparing for war. They have everything to do with the radical leftist agenda of this administration and others like them around the world which we call Marxists," Boykin told show host Tony Perkins. "We're not attracting young men and women across America because we are offering them nothing but bullying and woke agenda training."
Boykin argued young people aren't fooled by what's going on.
"Would you want to go into a military that does not train you for war, that does not give you anything to make you feel like a warrior, to make you feel like somebody who can go out on that battlefield and be victorious? What they do give you is critical race theory, inclusion training, all of these things," he said.
The independent news outlet MilitaryTimes.com says the Army's current 452,000 active-duty soldiers represent its smallest force since 1940, the year before the U.S. entered World War II.
The DOD's social engineering efforts have contributed to the decline, according to Boykin. The result, he said, could very likely lead to a draft. In addition, the decline is impacting special forces units – not just the general rank and file.
"They're all being impacted by these mandatory things that they have to do, which in most cases take time away from what they really ought to be doing … which is spending time out there on the range, out their shooting their weapons and becoming proficient in their skills," Boykin emphasized. "Those are the skills they're going to need on the battlefield – and we're wasting a lot of time."
Troops being 'bullied' into vaccine, other life choices
Boykin continued: "The other part is we've bullied our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines – we've bullied them all. We have put out 8,000 people in the Army alone; and if you talk to some of the soldiers who I have talked to, they will tell you that they were bullied. Some of them were bullied into taking the vaccine, and others who refused to take it were put out of the military.
"Do you think any soldier is going to want to follow a leader who has just bullied him into doing something that he is very opposed to, which is take a vaccine that he does not believe in for various reasons?
"You're not going to get a soldier to follow a leader on the battlefield who knows that leader does not care about him, [but instead] cares about his next promotion and is not going to do anything to try and preserve that soldier's career. [That leader is] going to follow some ridiculous instructions he's received and hasn't done anything to push back on them."
The way to reverse course, the retired general says, is to return to proven practices of taking care of enlisted personnel and attracting new recruits. But he's not sure the DOD is willing to do that.
"The Army is failing. The whole military is failing to recruit adequate people because they will not face up to the reality that they have gotten so far off track that they need to go back to the time-tested things that we've used to fill the ranks of our military. And if they don't, we're going to wind up with a draft as the only option."
