(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) The United States Army has had to reduce its “end strength” in order to compensate for a lack of qualified recruits, according to a report at Breitbart.
Blaming a “tight labor market,” Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo told reporters during a March 28 press briefing that the Army was “facing . . . some challenging conditions in terms of our ability to recruit and attract talent.”
Camarillo said that the Army was unwilling to adjust its “specific criteria for quality” and decided instead to “just temporarily reduce end strength, as opposed to lowering our standards.”
“We proactively made a decision to temporarily reduce end strength from 485,000 Soldiers to 473,000 Soldiers in FY ’23,” Camarillo said.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr gave several reasons for the Army’s recruitment failures, including the American obesity and mental health crises, President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the perception that the military has gone woke.
“The Army has not faced such recruiting headwinds in the last 30 years,” Spoehr said.
“There is a sense among the American public that the military is becoming increasingly political and that topics such as race and gender equity, critical race theory, and wokeism in general are commanding more attention, at the cost of readiness,” Spoehr said.
Luckily, the U.S. Army Recruiting Command formed a Diversity Outreach Inclusion Team last year, according to the Army News Service.
“We are an Army that wants to look like America,” said Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, USAREC commander.
Despite Under Secretary Camarillo’s claim that the Army has not lowered its quality standards, the Army has recently unveiled a new fitness test that offers lowers fitness standards and offers “gendered scoring,” according to Military.com.
The new test will “have different scoring standards for men and women across different age groups . . . following a congressionally mandated report . . . that found nearly half of the service’s women could not pass earlier standards for the test.”
