President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have overseen a historic turnaround.
As we close out 2025, the Trump Administration has racked up many big wins. But none are as significant as what President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth have done to repair the recruitment crisis that took place during President Biden’s watch.
When I served in the House of Representatives, I chaired the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, so I saw firsthand how bad things got under Biden, especially at the Pentagon and in our military.
When Biden was president, he presided over the worst recruitment crisis since our military became an all-volunteer force over 50 years ago.
In 2022, the Army set a goal to recruit 60,000 new soldiers, but it only managed to recruit 45,000. That’s 15,000 soldiers short. And the same thing happened again the following year, when the Army was again 15,000 soldiers short of its 65,000 recruitment goal. When you add up the recruitment losses under President Biden between 2021 and 2025, the Army shrank by 40,000 soldiers due to a lack of recruits. That’s as many as four divisions of troops.
The Navy fared no better. In 2023, it was 7,500 sailors short of its recruitment goal of 37,000. In 2024, it was nearly 5,000 short of its goal of over 40,000 new sailors. So between 2021 and 2025, the Navy shrank by 16,000 sailors, which is about three aircraft carriers’ worth of United States sailors.
That’s how bad the recruitment crisis got during Joe Biden’s watch.
But how did this happen? The Biden Administration treated the military as a political experiment. I don’t think we’ve seen the military politicized in that way ever before in American history.
The Biden Pentagon dropped physical fitness standards to support woke DEI initiatives throughout the armed services. As a side note, the Marines were the only good news during those four years, because the Marine Corps never dropped its standards.
Then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand down to combat extremism in the military immediately after Joe Biden was sworn into office. They spent nearly six million man-hours military-wide on that stand down. Those are hours that could have been spent on training our troops to combat our biggest enemy—and our biggest geopolitical threat—China. Or those millions of hours could have been spent on preparing to evacuate Afghanistan in a much more responsible way. Instead, the Biden Administration focused on partisan politics.
Then, General C.Q. Brown, who served as the General Chief of Staff of the Air Force, issued racial quotas for the United States Air Force.
Even worse, Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Army argued it was a bad thing that more than 80% of our recruits come from military families. She said there was “a risk of developing a warrior caste in America.” When the Secretary of the Army should have been trying to boost recruitment, she insulted patriotic Americans who are inspired by their parents to serve and suggested that the Army didn’t want them.
When you combine all these factors, it’s no wonder we had a recruitment crisis in the United States Armed Forces. Fewer young Americans wanted to serve, because they stopped believing in the mission.
I often think back to a 2023 article from the Wall Street Journal that featured a poll showing that patriotism among Americans, especially young Americans, had plummeted to a historic low. Only 38% of Americans in 2023 said that patriotism was very important to them. That was down from 70% in the 1990s. To this day, this story astonishes me. I’d love to see an updated poll showing what those numbers look like today.
You can’t build a military without patriots. You can’t ask young men and women to put their lives on the line when the culture tells them that the country isn’t worth fighting and dying for. You can’t expect the next generation of Americans to raise their right hand, as so many of my colleagues did in the Senate, and take an oath to protect this nation when so few believe America is the greatest country in the history of the world.
The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan played a huge part in the military recruitment shortage under Joe Biden. Americans saw 13 brave servicemembers killed at Abbey Gate, including a Hoosier. American guns and vehicles were abandoned to the Taliban on that embarrassing, disastrous, and deadly day. Young Americans asked themselves, “Who wants to be part of that type of military?” And they said, “Not me.”
The good news is that all of these issues have been fixed in a short period of time. President Trump changed everything. In fact, it changed immediately on election day, just a little over a year ago.
Military leaders testified that recruitment increased dramatically the day Donald Trump won the election. The Army met its 2025 recruitment numbers four months early. The Army reached its retention goals for the whole year in just six months. Navy recruitment hit a 20-year record.
And how did all of this happen? President Trump and Secretary Hegseth are inspiring young people to serve, because they are restoring our military’s strength and greatness. They stopped wokeness and DEI initiatives throughout the Department of War. And they are focused on what really matters to our military: patriotism, a sense of mission, and lethality.
Under Joe Biden, young Americans saw the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Today, they see a military that puts America first, taking out narco-terrorists before they can bring deadly drugs into our country. Seventy-one percent of Americans say they support strikes on these drug boats.
When you ask young men and women if that’s the type of military they want to be part of—one that’s stopping drugs from flooding into America, killing our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors, our friends—you get an overwhelming yes.
When America is strong, when America is confident, when America wins, our young people want to serve. Patriotism isn’t dead; it was just dormant during Biden’s four years in office. Patriotic citizens were waiting for leadership that America could believe in again, like what we have in Donald Trump today.
Secretary of War Hegseth is doing an extraordinary job. He’s the exact leader we need to restore the military’s focus on lethality after four disastrous years under Joe Biden, when the focus was on anything but. He has brought back the warrior ethos to our military. And he has worked hard to ensure that America’s Armed Forces can meet tomorrow’s challenges.
Our enemies have been put on notice under Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of War.
The path forward is clear: we must continue supporting this administration’s efforts to restore our military and make it as great as it can be. Our all-volunteer military depends on Americans who choose to serve. Americans will choose to serve when they believe in the mission, trust their leaders, and take pride in this great country. President Trump is giving them that, and America is stronger for it. That’s great news as we close out 2025.
