Public Trust in the Military Collapses

Pentagon plans social media blitz, ignoring the true reasons

Confidence in the American military has fallen to its lowest point in over 20 years, according to Gallup. Public trust in the military has plummeted to 45 percent from 70 percent in 2018, another survey has found. 

The precipitous decline is a testament to just how badly the Pentagon has screwed up its only real job: winning wars. There are many reasons why confidence has plummeted, but it all comes back to the broader societal reality that the Pentagon brass are inveterate losers.

The public’s loss of confidence in the armed forces is a stunning reversal for an institution that had near-universal public approval after 9/11. And yet, 23 years after the attack, we’re still fighting al Qaeda and its offshoots now spread across sub-Saharan Africa, we are still in Iraq, we are fighting in Syria, we are still spending billions on Afghanistan, and still fighting in Yemen, in Somalia and throughout the Sahel. We are still going after the Axis of Evil. 

Like a Hollywood superhero franchise, the bad guys never really die and new ones are constantly added to the list. A cynic might say that nothing changes, but one thing that has changed is we’re now at war with Russia, too — in the Pentagon’s familiar slogging way, devoid of any resolution. Oh, and don’t let any of that distract you from our new transcendent purpose: winning the Cold War with China.

As with the White Sox, you can only lose so many times before people demand change. But Major League Baseball is far more accountable than the Pentagon, where no one is seemingly ever fired. Just look at the freakout over Trump’s threat to fire even just one of them. 

The Pentagon brass is insulated from consequences of their endless wars, and they know it. That’s why retired generals like Mark Milley keep inserting themselves into the political process despite tradition and even laws prohibiting them from doing so. They know that they are a valuable commodity for their ability to help corporations make more money off of the Pentagon, and they’ll never get called or even challenged on anything they say. This is how they get away with patting themselves on the back for a job well done in one disastrous war after another. 

Consider, for example, retired Army Lt. General Mark Hertling reciting a long list of the Middle East countries we’re at war in, before declaring it a “masterful” exercise in preventing conflict. Hertling told CNN’s Jim Acosta this morning:

“The tensions throughout this area — and not only in Lebanon and Gaza, but against Iran, against Syria, against the PMF forces in Iraq, in Yemen, the Houthis — I believe the Biden administration has been somewhat masterful in preventing this from turning into a much wider conflict.”

Masterful? Only in the minds of these men who have never been graded on the resolution of anything. Take, say, the current Secretary of Defense, retired Army general Lloyd Austin. His masterful achievement was being the commander in Iraq and of all U.S. forces in the Middle East. Anyone remember how that turned out?

You can see the public’s low opinion of the military in its inability to recruit enough young people to serve, now an almost decade-long problem. The Pentagon is quick to blame young peoples’ lack of patriotism, their laziness, obesity in society — anything but its own leadership. 

This is of course a complex issue, but can you really blame young people for not enlisting? Imagine getting a job offer from a company you constantly see in the news bumbling through one disaster after another and for which there is no prospect of change because no executive is ever fired or held accountable. “Everything’s going masterfully,” one of them says on TV after reciting a list of countries in which sales are plummeting. Would you take that job?

In a sign of how dire the situation is, the Army just decided that it will post generals at urban centers like Atlanta and Los Angeles to try to do better amongst urban kids. And now, the General Accounting Office says, the military has a “brand” problem. 

“Today's military services are using digital marketing, among other efforts, to reach Generation Z—known for its use of digital media and whose views about the military have been steadily declining…The services need to better manage risks to their brands, assess whether marketing efforts are effective, and make good use of marketing funds.”

The military’s brilliant plan is to storm the beaches of social media, where this genus Generatius Zephyrus is known to frequent. From the GAO report:

“The military services use digital marketing on social media platforms—such as Facebook, X, and Instagram, among others—to inform young people about career paths and military life…According to the Army’s advertising agency, younger generations view the real world through social media discussions, videos, and memes, which influences their values and beliefs.”

As you probably guessed, social media wasn’t the silver bullet solution the Pentagon hoped it might be. The GAO report continues:

“…the Army designed the marketing campaign to close the relatability gap between Generation Z and the Army by offering a look at the lives and motivations of some people who choose to join the Army. However, shortly after the campaign launched, Army officials noticed a significant increase in negative commentary that violated their social media policy and disabled the comments section.”

Hilariously, the social media app you’re most likely to find Gen Z on — TikTok — the military can’t officially use, due to the ban on federal employees using it over hypothetical concerns about its Chinese ownership. But even if they did, it wouldn’t matter. Enlistment isn’t sagging because recruiters aren’t doing the TikTok dance or posting epic enough memes on X. The reason it’s falling is much more obvious: who wants to join a brand that has LOSER written all over it?

Trump’s prescription is to fire the losers. But his appointees also want to increase defense spending, rewarding the institution for its losing ways, somehow confident that topping a $1 trillion a year defense budget will remake this not-so-greatest generation. It is interesting that Trump’s picks — Waltz, Hegseth, Gabbard — are only mid-level officers, not the sainted senior officers of the current generation. Still, I’m doubtful that they’ll turn things around. But if they do, the American public might change its mind.

— Edited by William M. Arkin