According to a story by The Daily Caller, the number of white military recruits has declined – “tumbled”– since 2018, a five-year period. In the U.S. Army, for example, 56% of the recruits who enlisted in 2018 were white but that number collapsed to 44% during the 2023 fiscal year, which ended last September.
That dramatic drop in the Army was the worst among the military branches, the Daily Caller story said, but the Navy, Air Force, and Marines all saw drops in white recruits during that same period.
It’s not clear where the recruitment data came from for the Daily Caller story, which credits a January story published at Military.com for breaking the news about white recruits.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, tells AFN it’s not hard to trace the drop in white recruits to so-called “woke” topics on race and racism, and gender and sexuality.
The twin issues of race and racism, when they are addressed in a meeting of soldiers or Marines, often focus on white people and the Marxist-based belief that privileged whites are racist oppressors with power and struggling minorities are the oppressed.
Those topics have now been forced on every military branch, with the Pentagon’s approval, Donnelly says, and now the largest demographic of potential recruits know they're not wanted by their own military.
"When you pursue those policies, and impose them with coercion," she warns, "you hurt the institution deliberately."
DEI chief complained about 'white folx'
Last month, that racially-charged environment was exposed at a congressional hearing over anti-white comments made Kelisa Wing, the Pentagon’s now-former DEI chief. In a Twitter post from 2020, she wrote:
I’m so exhausted at these white folx in these PD [professional development] sessions this lady actually had the CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too…I had to stop the session then give Karen the BUSINESS…we are not the majority, we don’t have power.”
At the hearing, Republicans grilled Pentagon official Gil Cisneros about his investigation – which began last October – into Wing’s comments.
“This is wildly inappropriate and unacceptable. Do you agree with that, Mr. Cisneros?" Rep. Elise Stefanik asked Cisneros.
"I do agree that that is not acceptable. It's not condoned by…the Department of Defense," he replied.
Wing was not punished because her remarks were made in her “personal capacity,” he said, but she was reassigned to a new job unrelated to DEI work.
Cisneros’ title at the Pentagon, incidentally, is Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.
“Wokeism takes progressivism to extremes [and] imposes it with coercion,” Donnelly says. “No dissent, even if it hurts the institution.”
The institution that is being hurt, she concludes, is the United States military.
