No Shit Sherlock

 Recruitment is WAY down!

The mention several reasons why, but dance around something they mention.

"The fact is the pool of Americans aged 17-24 who are qualified and interested in serving continues to shrink."

Bold and underlined mine.

Making military service a social experiment dramatically reduces the interest of those who make your best troops.

The best years of our volunteer military are when they reflect an honest cross-section of America and not trying to force a distortion of that reflection.

This is fallout from forgetting what a military is actually for.

Killing people and breaking shit.

Every single time the politicians stray from that ideal, recruitment suffers and our military hollows out.

Making military service something that people want to do helps a great deal, but that means abandoning the petri-dish aspect we're forcing onto it.

Recognizing that killing people and breaking shit is the main goal, and devoting most of our time to that end will make recruitment recover.

Eliminating social sops that do nothing but drag on readiness will also help.

I'm looking at you ladies.  Getting knocked up right before your unit deploys should be a bad conduct discharge.

People wasting their enlistment chasing free gender transition surgery should be eliminated too.

Just in case you think I'm picking on the protected classes too much, how many great soldiers have been ruined by the antics of their wife?

I support the right of women to get pregnant, trans folks to transition, and marriage but there's a time and a place for everything and military service is a sacrifice.