[01:00:00:03 - 01:00:15:17]
Speaker 1
 In 2023, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 10,000 soldiers. Two years later though, every service beat its recruiting goals months early. Institutions do not swing like that accidentally.

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Speaker 1
 Something broke the forces connection to the American people

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Speaker 1
 and then the Trump administration restored that connection.

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Speaker 1
 Doug, this I think was the story of the Biden Pentagon in many ways, is for the first time in decades, every service except the Marine Corps would consistently miss recruiting goals. Not by a little bit, by tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

[01:00:43:19 - 01:01:21:06]
Speaker 1
 It created a crisis. But what I want to offer in this conversation is a little bit of a zag to the zig of the typical consensus around this. Yes, I think in part there was a frustration between the American people and the military, the failures of the war on terror, the wokeness that took over the military. But what I don't want people to forget is that in many ways this recruiting crisis took place by design because it was military policy to prefer

[01:01:22:12 - 01:01:37:07]
Speaker 1
 minority populations over white Americans when trying to form the ranks of the joint service. And that has real effects when it comes to military readiness. That's right, quota systems.

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Speaker 2
 That's right. They come in and you shrink the field down. Everybody who's on the outside of that feels it.

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Speaker 2
 Yes.

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Speaker 2
 That to me is,

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Speaker 2
 like you mentioned it, you already had this

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Speaker 2
 pervasive wokeness going through which makes everybody that's recommending or discouraging somebody from joining the military, they're looking at this and this is your son or daughter thinking about joining, you're like, I don't know, it looks pretty bad. And on top of it, what you're talking about, it starts to feel like I'm not even welcome. And if I did get in, I don't even wanna be in there. So you had two things going on at once. And it was a real mess. I don't think to your point now that it's kinda snapped back, you can see how far it had fallen and how crazy it was getting. And thankfully, Trump's president, we got it fixed.

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Speaker 1
 Right, and so the story that I'll point people to is a military.com report on army internal data. So it wasn't conjecture, this was army data. In 2018, 45,000 army recruits were white Americans. In 2023, 25,000 recruits were white Americans. In my mind, there's no other explanation for that precipitous of a drop in the share of white recruits other than discrimination. We know that quotas were in place across the force to ensure that

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Speaker 1
 the army in particular was more quote unquote diverse based on race.

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Speaker 1
 And I think it's a sign that the army cared more about meeting those quotas than they did meeting recruiting goals. And I do think candidly that the kind of the speed at which we've in many ways solved this recruiting crisis is evidence of the fact that policy changed and we were no longer discriminatory against white Americans in the Trump administration.

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Speaker 2
 That's right, yeah, big change. And I think this has been going on all over the country. I think there's gonna be a lot of lawsuits coming up in corporate America.

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Speaker 3
 Right.

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Speaker 2
 Yeah, public companies that get their corporate HR departments under control, because this is going on there too, as everybody knows, but discrimination's wrong.

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Speaker 2
 does it hurt? Everything we've been talking about, the readiness of the military. And if we don't have a military that's ready, then we've got an even bigger problem.

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Speaker 1
 It's not about a culture war, it's about a real war. That's right. I will bring up this kind of historical analogy that you and I have discussed before, not analogy, an example from history, just to demonstrate that there is a return to common sense policy. In 1948, Truman racially integrated the army after World War II, meaning that in the same units, blacks could serve with white Americans.

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Speaker 1
 The kind of implementation path he took to enforce that executive order was unique in the sense that he removed any race box to check on army personnel files. So when I went to the recruiting depot and joined, I wasn't saying I'm white, I'm black, I'm Hispanic. I was, "Will Tebow, five foot 10, 195, fighting weight." And there was no way for me to be categorized based on my race. Of course, when America sought to, through the force of law, correct supposed racial injustice, we had to revert back to a system that classified people on the basis of race and eventually sex. If I could urge Secretary of Hexet and President Trump to kind of take one more step in this vein, it's to remove that box once again on personnel files. Stop asking people's, you can't go to kindergarten class and ask,

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Speaker 1
 without telling people your race, well, let's make the army once again a place where you don't have to divulge and profess this fact about yourself.

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Speaker 2
 Yeah, to your point, it's like, what was the reason that got put on there to generate the quotas? Right, exactly. And if you're gonna go to a place where you really just want the absolute best person, no matter who it is, take it all off there. See how they come in, they perform, they don't, they go. We want the best people and the best, for those jobs, doing the best work they possibly can do. Otherwise, we're just degrading the whole thing over time. And this is where this episode is, I go back to the first one, right? This is where this all began because it is a real indication of how far the culture has slid over the years to get to the place where these numbers, the 45,000 down to 25,000, that's the proof of how endemic this got and how bad it got.

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Speaker 1
 I'd love your thoughts just kind of, literally living this yourself and thinking about your own service, the choices that your family makes in the future, how that all intersected.

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Speaker 2
 Yeah, no, it was actually a topic of conversation because my two sons were in that window of time,

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Speaker 2
 BLM riots and everything else, and they're talking about these things, and I'm watching it all happen. And so, yeah, if you know what the military was like when you were in, and then you've been watching changes, and you've been hearing certain things and looking at certain things, and then it really does come down to, yes, I definitely want the military to be available for our country and to do its job and all those things, but if the probability is getting way too high that if your son or daughter goes in there, and if your son has to go into combat,

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Speaker 2
 that the probability is up that he's gonna die because of all this stuff that's going on, I mean, what parent is gonna encourage him to do it? They just, it has to be one in the other direction. It has to be improving always. Otherwise, the parent is gonna say, well, it's this bad now, they're gonna join, they're gonna be in there for three, four, five years, and in year four, they might have to go to war. How bad is it gonna be at that point? So that's how we're already, they're thinking on it. So you've gotta keep the trend line always going positive.

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Speaker 1
 Well, and again, it was multifaceted. Yes, it was the sense that the military had succumbed to this woke indoctrination. My kids aren't at that age yet, but I don't want them to join an institution that presents an inherent contrast between their faith and their job, where they have to make that choice every day to violate the moral fabric in which we raise them. But on the other hand is, I joined the army, I think you were of the same mind because I wanted to, when my life was over, I wanted to kind of look at my family and say, hey, whatever our nation asked, I was willing to fight because I believe that the job of the military was to fight and win wars that benefited the American people. I think for the first two decades of the 21st century, we lost that sense. I think my generation of veterans started to lose the confidence that the sacrifice that some of us made, but candidly, the brothers and sisters came home made, that that sacrifice wasn't worth it. And it

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Speaker 1
 was really hard to think about expecting or asking my sons to then go into that same formation if the mission and the purpose of their sacrifice is not oriented on the causes that actually benefit the American people. That's right. And it was, you know, it's still a vexing thing. I still don't think it's resolved.

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Speaker 2
 No, it's not resolved. We're hopeful that it's improving. There's a lot of work to do or we wouldn't be doing this podcast. Right, exactly. There's a lot there, but this stuff is all connected. You know, you have to, you know, you're talking about the value in somebody's heart of their patriotic duty to their country. And so you have to ask yourself, why am I doing this? And if your answer is in some way, well, I just don't think this thing is gonna last or, you know, you're being honest with yourself, right? And I don't think it's gonna last. I feel discriminated against. This is not going in a good direction. You know, that's not something at that moment to die for. Now you can always have your family and, I mean, we all come from different families and no matter what you're upbringing sometimes, you're gonna be, I'm going, I'm doing this no matter what. But we're talking about a lot of people kind of in the middle that we need them to think clearly about what we've got here and where this could go good or bad. And they need to participate in it. And if they feel like their leadership is clear eyed, you know, we talk about strategy, we talk about spending the right money, we talk about identifying our enemies. But if all that is out the window and there's kind of just this vagueness about, well, it's a, you know, I would say it's not an American dream, it's a nation. This is a nation, right? We have people, we have borders, we have a military, we have people out to get us.

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Speaker 3
 Yeah.

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Speaker 2
 Thankfully I was born here, my ancestors were here. Okay, I gotta do something about this, right? And so, but people have to have that connection. And if they feel this sense that their government is abandoning them or not thinking clearly about what the right thing to do is, they tend to slide into, ah, let somebody else do it. And it just, it gets pervasive. And so I hope it comes back. It certainly feels like it is. We're in a better place than we were. For sure. Right? For sure. So, you know, I think you and I, in particular, how we think about things, our calling is to try to get it back on a better track, even better than what it's on now, and keep moving forward.

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Speaker 1
 Yeah, it's to revive the sentiment that both of us had when we joined. I will say that, you know, it's interesting to pay attention to the rhetoric of the left. They always decry this supposed warrior cast. You know, as if it's something that we must break. The left seems to me to be committed to ensuring that the military looks like the nation writ large. That there is no unique set of families and communities who send, you know, their sons to war. It's almost as if the left hates the notion that there could be such traditional, almost ancestral obligations to defend the nation. In my mind, I think it's reality. And I think that we shouldn't fight the fact that the predilection to serve your country, to fight for America, is genetic and inherited in some way. Not to say that that should be a kind of precondition of service. Yeah, that's right, yeah. But I think we should foster this warrior cast. That's right. And warrior ethos. Because that pride of service is a generational fact.

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Speaker 2
 That's right, and I think the more that guys like us and Americans that think like we think talk about the military like what we're talking about, and merit, and this has gotta be hard. Yes. And you've gotta have levels of compensation for the guys that go down range versus the guys that are back a little bit. And the previous conversations we've had about there's a civilian culture and there's a military culture. The more the left talks like that, no, no, no, let's just all make it one big thing. And we get more aggressive about talking about the way it should be in reality. It creates contrast, and I think the Americans that are in the middle, that are kind of like, I don't pay attention to it like what we do. They will tend more our direction, because they know it's for the best. Which will then longer term create more of the kind of,

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Speaker 2
 we want more of that ancestral duty. I think about that a lot. My first ancestor came back here, came from Belgium in 1678, right? That's a lot. That's a lot of true acts is building stuff. And so I got a responsibility. And so we need everybody that's living here to think that in some way, shape, or form. And if they don't, they ask themselves, what are you for? I guess go move to some other country that you wanna hang out. But this is our country, and we have to think about it clearly, and be grateful for the warrior class that steps up and does all this.

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Speaker 1
 And it really is a thermometer reading of the integrity of our nation. That's right.

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