“Digging ourselves out of a hole.” Some thoughts on the current recruiting crisis

In the past year we have been bombarded by stories about the military – particularly the Army, experiencing a recruiting crisis that has caused major shortfalls in manning the force.  There are various reasons given for this recruiting shortfall.  From pushback against the “woke” military by traditional military families to non-participation by normally liberal/progressive communities,  the impact of the Afghan debacle and the mismanaged “Global War On Terror” (GWOT) conflicts of the first two decades of the 21st century to highly publicized veteran’s issues (suicide etc.), the involuntary separation of thousands of servicemembers who were reticent to take the COVID vaccine, changing demographics, competitive pay scales in the civilian workplace and cumbersome recruiting processes, the causes given for the recruiting crisis are legion and likely all true to some extent.