Shawn Fleetwood of the Federalist offers President-elect Donald Trump a prescription for improving the American military.

While no institution has been spared from these radical policies, there’s one in particular whose suffering Americans who care about the future security of the United States should take heed of: the military.

For the past four years, America’s armed forces have been undergoing a “reimagining.” Not content with simply allowing the military’s infrastructure to decline, the leftist ghouls running the White House have prioritized shoehorning neo-Marxist ideology into the service over the capabilities of America’s warfighters, prompting troops to abandon ship and dissuading new recruits from jumping on board.

Such destructive policies have left the United States’ defense apparatus in a vulnerable state. With foreign conflicts breaking out across the world and foreign adversaries becoming increasingly aggressive, it’s imperative the incoming Trump administration hit the ground running on restoring the military to the lethal and efficient fighting force it once was. As any good general knows, a military is only as capable as the individuals who comprise it. Unfortunately for the Pentagon, convincing qualified men to join today’s service has become a nightmare.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, every branch of the military (with the exception of the Marine Corps) has struggled to meet its recruiting targets. While all branches met their FY2024 recruiting goals, many of them abandoned long-held enlistment standards to hit them. Traditional requirements that enlistees possess a high school diploma or GED were scrapped, while fitness standards were lowered to increase the pool of eligible applicants.

While legacy media have attempted to blame the crisis on Republicans, Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow for The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Security, told The Federalist that the military’s inability to bring in new talent is largely a problem of its own making. He specifically highlighted the Biden Defense Department’s promotion of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) ideology, arguing the overzealous focus on racial and gender politics is “very divisive and counterproductive” to the force’s overall mission.