The demographic and fiscal time bombs ticking inside the Pentagon
By John Ferrari
Thursday, Sep 28
The Defense Department will face a precipitous decline in the number of 18-year-olds in the second half of this decade. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
While most people are rightfully focused on the current congressional impasse surrounding the fiscal 2024 budget and the hold on the military confirmation process, there are two larger and more challenging problems that will endanger our national security in the near term: the lack of 18-year-olds to serve and our country’s towering fiscal deficits.
Over the past several years, most of the military services have at one point or another missed their recruiting numbers, with the Army taking the most dramatic hit. The lack of new recruits has shrunk the Army down to about 450,000 in the active force, roughly 33,000 lower in size than the service otherwise wants to be. However, as the services are breathing a small sigh of relief that 2023 was not as bad as 2022, they are simply ignoring the inevitable catastrophe facing them, starting in 2026: the lack of 18-year-olds.
Behind this deep and sustained decline is the 2008 financial crisis, which caused birthrates to fall. As the chart below shows, the services felt this decline in 2022 due to the number of 18-year-olds bottoming out at roughly 8.7 million nationwide in 2021. And, while they are now feeling a respite from that population’s size growing to 9.4 million in 2025, they will face a certain and swift decline to about 8 million 18-year-olds in 2029. This near 15% drop between 2025 and 2029 is likely to be felt at twice that rate by the military since it hasn’t competed well with higher education and the workforce for 18-year-old talent. By the end of this decade, it’s therefore possible that the services will miss their recruiting targets by about 30%, year-after-year.
https://www.militarytimes.com/opinion/2023/09/29/the-demographic-and-fiscal-time-bombs-ticking-inside-the-pentagon/
