Veterans worried about the quality of leadership are counseling young family members not to join up.
The veteran community has lost faith in the country’s national-security leadership. The military is a family business—80% of volunteers have a family member who served. Three years into a recruiting crisis, however, the Pentagon hasn’t specifically surveyed this core constituency to determine what’s going wrong.
Pew surveys in 2011 and again in 2019 found approximately 80% of veterans would advise young people to join the military. 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%.
