America Has a Commitment Surplus, Not a Recruiting Shortage
Pete Hegseth should focus on shifting the American defense burden elsewhere, not on sharing it or changing course to meet it.
Doug Bandow
Jan 23, 2025
Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, appears likely to win Senate approval, albeit by a small margin. With few of the traditional qualifications for the job, his backers hope he will shake up a Pentagon used to losing wars that the U.S. should not have fought.
Yet he believes the military’s recruiting crisis–which eased some last year but is by no means solved–is a problem of insufficient personnel. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I think that the decline in end strength since 2021 is due to recruiting challenges rather than a conclusion that our military needed fewer forces. This has occurred during an era of increasing security challenges. Therefore, it is likely that the military’s current end strength is insufficient to accomplish its mission.”
Nevertheless, despite promising he would be different from his predecessors, he too is taking American foreign policy for granted. In practice, Washington’s denizens want to do everything, having expanded the venerable Monroe Doctrine to demand that other governments accept not only American intervention throughout the Western Hemisphere, but around the world. The result has been constant foreign meddling and, all too often, full-scale wars.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/america-has-a-commitment-surplus-not-a-recruiting-shortage/
