DOD: We’ll Take Anyone for This War. Well, as Long as You’re Not …

Based on his new recruitment policies, Pete Hegseth cares more about winning culture wars than the real war he just helped start.

When countries get embroiled in a war, they usually cast a wide net for people to join the military and work to keep the ones who are already in. The United States appears to be sending troops from several Marine Expeditionary Units, the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 75th Rangers, 10th Mountain Division, and assorted special operations into the fight in Iran. At the same time, the administration is lowering standards to let more people into the military—except for those they feel are unfit to die honorably for the white, conservative Christian nation they envision. Additionally, in one prominent gaffe, the White House hinted that it might consider reinstituting the draft. This is almost unprecedented historically, with one grim but unsurprising exception.

Whenever a country that relies on volunteers to fill the ranks of its armed forces gets involved in a bloody and unpopular war, recruiting success rates decrease, as does the quality of those recruits. No one wants to die for a war they don’t believe in or understand, and only people desperate for money tend to join or stay in. Such people usually aren’t the most qualified, and the quality of the people who join or stay in drops as a result.

The usual short-term solutions to recruitment and retention problems are to offer pay increases, bonuses, and incentives, and to lower the standards for recruitment. The people brought in under these circumstances are frequently treated as cannon fodder. During Vietnam, “Project 100,000” brought in 300,000-plus troops who would have been previously considered unqualified due to their low IQ scores. Some commentators mocked them as McNamara’s Misfits, after the sitting defense secretary. These troops died in extraordinarily high numbers.

Similarly, during the War in Iraq in the early 2000s, the Army offered massive bonuses, introduced stop-loss (allowing the military to involuntarily extend service members’ active duty), and dramatically lowered recruiting standards. Still, the recruitment and retention situation remained critical until the Great Recession made Iraq look better to a lot of people than the American job market.

An even more dramatic example is found in Russia’s war in Ukraine, where they have needed to replace in excess of 30,000 to........

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