(The Daily Signal)—A focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion has damaged the effectiveness of the U.S. military and hurt recruitment numbers.
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, on Tuesday. One exchange in particular highlighted the wrongheaded thinking that infects some in the current U.S. leadership and how it addresses the military’s challenges.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the panel, said in hostile questioning of Hegseth that the military is “more diverse than it has ever been” and that it is more lethal.
Sen. Jack Reed claims that the military is more lethal than ever because it's more diverse than ever pic.twitter.com/RgyItLVOtC
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 14, 2025
The military may be more “diverse” than it has ever been. However, it’s also getting smaller and faces severe readiness challenges.
As Vice President-elect JD Vance noted on X during the questioning, the military has suffered through an ongoing recruitment crisis.
I find this grandstanding from Senate Democrats over the Hegseth confirmation perplexing.
We haven't won a war in three decades and we have a major recruitment challenge.
Hegseth is assuredly NOT more of the same, and that's good!
— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 14, 2025
The Pentagon, especially under the Biden administration, has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority for the military. The justification was that to bring in new people, the military needed to “look like” the country.
Alex Wagner, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, explained the administration’s reasoning at a 2023 House Armed Services Committee Hearing.
“Intentional diversity and inclusion efforts allow us to tap into the full talents of the American people and then leverage those talents to defend the nation,” Wagner said.
He said that the focus on DEI was “informed by science and business best practices, congressional mandates, data-focused policy reviews and assessments.”
The most prominent pro-DEI business study has been debunked, however. But it’s no surprise that the military continued to have abysmal recruitment records throughout President Joe Biden’s tenure despite the claims of DEI proponents.
The diversity efforts seem to have done little to bring in a flood of recruits from previously underrepresented backgrounds. Worse, there has been a collapse of recruitment from demographics that disproportionately served in the past.
According to a report by the Daily Caller News Foundation, there has been a serious decline in white recruits since 2018.
That shouldn’t be a surprise, because as Daily Caller further reported, the Air Force in 2022 made reducing the number of white male officers a priority. Racial quotas not only damage the ability of the military to promote the best and brightest to the highest ranks, but they also demoralize those who either didn’t get a promotion and those who serve under commanders who they may now wonder whether or not they got their positions on their merits.
It’s no wonder retainment is also down in the military.
Most ominously for the U.S. all-volunteer military, the armed forces saw a severe downturn in recruitment from military families, many of whom have expressed extreme disenchantment with military service. Veterans also increasingly tell people not to sign up.
“Pew surveys in 2011 and again in 2019 found approximately 80% of veterans would advise young people to join the military,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October. “We recently commissioned a demographically representative YouGov survey of 2,100 veterans. Our data show the share of veterans recommending military service plunged 20 percentage points in five years, to just 62%.”
According to the Journal’s survey, “only 14% of veterans want the military to pay more attention to DEI.”
How can the United States continue to have the world’s most “lethal” army as its pool of warfighters dries up?
Those who defend DEI practices and insist that the military’s recruiting woes have nothing to do with DEI are in denial. At a time in which the number and scale of foreign conflicts is escalating, it’s alarming that the U.S. military appears increasingly unprepared to meet its challenges.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that even in the age of drones and other kinds of advanced military hardware, the backbone of any military is still a man with a rifle. What’s happened under Biden is that previous recruiting challenges became acute. The administration focused on divisive DEI programs while hiding behind the mantra that for the military, “diversity is our strength.”
We now have a glut of four-star generals, but too few rank-and-file troops, as Hegseth noted at Tuesday’s hearing.
Hegseth: “We won World War II with seven 4-star generals. Today, we have forty-four 4-star generals. There’s an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield. We don’t need more bureaucracy at the top. We need more warfighters empowered at the…
— Lucas Tomlinson (@LucasFoxNews) January 14, 2025
“The military exists to be lethal and to kill our enemies,” former Army Ranger Will Thibeau explained in a recent interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
“It’s a purpose that puts the military at odds with the values of our liberal society. … And what’s happened, certainly in the last decade or so, is that the military has become just another institution that reflects the values of our civil society. Those are values that are incompatible with an organization committed to lethality.”
A change is leadership and direction is desperately needed. Perhaps in a sign of things to come, the Army recently had a massive surge in recruitment that it hasn’t experienced in many years.
That’s curious timing. Hopefully, it’s a sign of things to come under the incoming new executive management.
- Hand-curated links from conservative and Christian sites — NO legacy media garbage links. Patriots get their news every day at JDRucker.com
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
