Now is a bad time for the US Army to be facing a decade-long recruitment problem. Wars are underway in Ukraine and Gaza following Russia’s invasion of the former and Hamas’s attack on Israel from the latter. Rumors of wars are brewing around Venezuela and Taiwan. Nevertheless, from 2013 to 2023, male enlistments in the US Army have dropped by more than a third while female enlistments have held steady. Despite steadily reducing the number of new troops it aims to bring in annually, the Army has fallen far short of its enlistment goals for several years in a row.   

The Army’s current issues with recruitment connect to longstanding tensions in American military culture. Since World War II, US citizens have tended to think of military victory as a product of resources and technology; give our armed forces enough funding and they will produce dominant machines and digital systems that will guarantee battlefield success and ensure national security.

Historian Adrian Lewis in his book The American Culture of War has demonstrated that this belief dovetails with consumer culture to drastically limit the pool for recruitment. US citizens focus on wealth and consumption as the measure of quality of life, leading the nation’s “best and brightest” to pursue careers as businessmen, lawyers, and engineers.

At the same time, lives of excessive consumption make many American men physically unfit for service. Lewis’s authoritative survey of American military history from World War II to the present concludes that our high-tech, low-manpower approach to armed conflict has undercut our conduct of war, repeatedly failing to produce victory. The Army’s current recruitment problems suggest that future US martial deployments will be similarly plagued. 

The Army’s responses to the challenge of enlistment decline tend to treat surface-level symptoms rather than the deeper disease. The recent “What’s Your Warrior” marketing campaign and mentions of financial benefits, such free college tuition and support for home loans failed to halt troubling recruitment trends. A new marketing effort restored the old slogan “Be All You Can Be,” but this pitch preserves the previous campaign’s focus on personal, selfish advantages to military service.

In his book Making Patriots, political scientist Walter Berns concluded that “reasoning on the basis of self-interest alone would not lead anyone to put his life at risk for another, or for his country.” Berns argued that a person must be educated into the self-sacrificial love for one’s country to be motivated to choose defending the nation over private-sector wages. What sociologists have labeled an “amotivational syndrome” among young men that makes them wait apathetically instead of pursuing opportunities would therefore be a matter of schooling, according to Berns. Our education system no longer trains young men in patriotism, so they find themselves passive, unable to see the benefits of an enlistment that requires virtues they do not possess.  

Christian citizens might make a difference in resolving the Army’s male recruitment problem if they draw on certain theological insights. Baptist theologian Denny Burk has proposed that God calls men to a “protector vocation.” They fulfill this role when safeguarding the people and creatures in their lives, including but not limited to their families and communities. Scripture likewise establishes that government is responsible for the protective work of preventing and punishing wrongdoing. One way that men could live in accordance with their divine design, therefore, would be to take up positions created by government for safeguarding the community. Such roles would include careers in the military, among others. That argument does not imply that women have no protective role according to the Bible. In the context of responding to the US Army’s male recruitment problem though, this reasoning does suggest that Christian citizens – parents, teachers, pastors, and others – could encourage young men in their lives, especially those struggling with passivity, to consider enlisting in the military. The justification for doing so would not be that young man’s private gain, but the opportunity to take up a career that aligns well with a protective goal established by God. 

The history of American martial institutions reveals that a sacrificial, protective emphasis once characterized military service. In his book The Naval Aristocracy, Peter Karsten argued that the Gilded Age US Navy, for example, stressed that its members’ commitment to military duty meant abandoning material gain in the name of patriotism. When writing my PhD dissertation, I found a similar set of ideas that influenced militia units. After the Civil War, many veterans entered political office. Those who became state governors often sought to strengthen their state militias, which would guard the local community from mob violence and support the national military during time of war. 

Governor John W. Geary of Pennsylvania, a former Union brigadier general, argued that the militia should “educate the mass” of young men in his state, teaching them “loyalty to the whole country, without which there can be no permanent safety for our liberty.”  North Carolina’s Governor Elias Carr, once a Confederate volunteer, argued that militia service would spread “the germ of patriotism” and set an example that would undercut the appeal of a life devoted to “disorder and lawlessness.” Personal, financial advantages did not motivate their willingness to give up time at work and with their families. They embraced a martial, protective role as a proper sacrifice for the wellbeing of their communities. Civil War veterans learned to consider military service as something rooted in virtue, not private gain. Though much has changed in the United States since the Gilded Age, perhaps men and women who have survived our recent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan could teach young Americans a similar perspective on enlistment in the Army today. 

War persists because of the destructive hold of sin on the human heart. To handle that reality well, the United States needs to overcome the manpower recruitment problem currently facing the Army. Citizens, especially Christians, should promote a reframing of military enlistment as based on sacrificial protective service rather than individual self-interest. Soldiers endure hardships and shoulder the responsibility for the just application of force in wartime. When seeking men for the US armed forces, encouraging them to think in terms of virtue rather than private gain as early as their recruitment will prepare them for hard choices ahead.