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 35,000 recruits per month simply to match combat losses. (For comparison, the U.S. Army aims to recruit about 65,000 per year, in a country with nearly three times the population.) To achieve this, the Russian government and its local provinces have offered huge bonuses, often equivalent to over a years’ worth of pay. They have also lowered standards to an unbelievable degree: They now take people in their fifties with no experience and have inducted at least three serial killer cannibals who had been languishing in prison.
Thus, when the Department of Defense announced on March 25 that it would raise the Army recruitment maximum age from 34 to 42 and let people with certain drug felony convictions join, it caught my attention. These are the sort of changes that the U.S. made during the worst recruiting situations from the mid-2000s during the height of the Iraq insurgency.
These are not the sorts of changes a country makes when the military is having no issues finding qualified recruits. Rather, they are made preemptively to prepare for a long, bloody, unpopular war. We saw something similar before the U.S. entry into World War II, when it began drafting people during peacetime and becoming laxer with physical and medical standards. (Real-life and movie war hero Audie Murphy was five-foot-five and skinny as a rail, for example, and likely would have struggled with current physical requirements for Marines.)
At the same time, in these circumstances, the military usually becomes more reluctant to kick people out. During the War in Iraq, separations for reasons of homosexuality dropped to near zero as the Department of Defense effectively stopped enforcing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In one apocryphal story during my time in the Navy, a sailor told his captain he was gay right before a deployment, to which the commanding officer responded, “No you’re not. Now get on my ****ing ship.”
At the same time that the U.S. is relaxing standards for many people to prepare for ground war in Iran, it is doing something far more unusual: forcing out tens of thousands of highly qualified service members who want to be there but who the administration believes are unworthy of the honor of serving their country. This includes women, Blacks, and transgender people.
One of Hegseth’s big initiatives has been to eliminate the “shaving chits” that allow men with medical waivers to refrain from shaving all the way to the skin. The most common cause for needing a “shaving chit” is pseudofolliculitis: a dermatological condition primarily suffered by Black men. A man with pseudofolliculitis can’t shave all the way to the skin, and normally, this is not an issue. However, close shaves can result in painful weeping sores and facial scarring.
Hegseth’s complete revocation of shaving chits offered thousands of Black service members an awful choice: Get clean shaven and suffer or be kicked out of the military. It has nothing to do with readiness or capability. A soldier on a shaving chit is no less effective than one who doesn’t need one. It is simply a matter of Hegseth thinking it looks unprofessional (it’s not; ask the Axis powers how much they liked fighting against Sikhs). It may also have been punishment aimed at Black Americans for consistently voting Democratic.
The Pentagon has also commissioned a study that appears to have been rigged from the start, on whether to continue to let women serve in combat roles. It is unknown what the final policy will look like, but it will almost certainly set women in the military back to a place before 2015, and potentially as far back as 1993, when women were not allowed to fly combat aircraft or serve on ships considered combatant until President Clinton removed the exclusion.
Finally, the most egregious example is the removal of transgender service members. They are being kicked out regardless of deployability, qualifications, performance, cost, or effects on units. The review boards set up for them are effectively rigged such that there is only one potential outcome. Officers kicked out for being transgender are being given so-called JDK discharge codes usually reserved for Communists, people who have committed treason, or those who have engaged in espionage against the United States, thereby locking them out of future jobs in defense.
In court, the Department of Defense has argued it should be allowed to do this because the president and the defense secretary have the authority to claim that transgender people are undeployable, regardless of the evidence against their claim. The fact that transgender service members are the only ones kicked out for “medical reasons,” even in cases where they had been 100 percent deployable top performers, has nothing to do with readiness and everything to do with punishing a group of people considered unworthy of the respect that comes from serving in the armed forces.
The closest historical parallel to what is happening to transgender people in the military is, surprise surprise, Adolf Hitler’s removal of Jewish troops from the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht. The difference is that Hegseth’s policies on transgender people are even more draconian than Hitler’s were on Jews in the army. In 1934, those who were “half- or quarter-blooded” Jews were allowed to remain in the German military as enlisted men or noncommissioned officers, respectively. Up to 150,000 people of partial Jewish ancestry were part of the German military during World War II. Seventy (or so) “full-blooded” Jews were pushed out of the military in 1934, while over 4,500 transgender people are being forced out of the American military today.
It is also worth pointing out that the only time a country excludes a group of people from the military when engaged in a war requiring massive manpower is when they do not even see those people as being valuable as slaves, cannon fodder, or bullet sponges. Only Germany in World War II resorted to this level of exclusion, and only then with “full-blooded” Jews. The Wehrmacht was more than happy to take on other “lesser” groups like Slavs, Ukrainians, Czechs, Poles, and more to draw on all the manpower resources available. This should provide some context for the intentions of the administration toward transgender people going forward.
The result of all this is a completely irrational recruitment and retention policy as the U.S. appears ready to plunge deeper into a bloody war that looks unwinnable on the ground. The Department of Defense is lowering standards for everyone except for the highly qualified, highly motivated people who belong to minority groups the administration despises. As a result, the military shrinks, the quality of personnel in the military drops, experience is unnecessarily lost, and the quality and size of the pool from which to draw recruits shrinks. The irony is that the people this administration despises won’t end up dying in the war it chose. It would be of some comfort to transgender people, if they weren’t well aware there are far worse things potentially waiting for them than fighting in Iran.
