Overview

The armed forces are struggling to address an unprecedented recruitment crisis, with three of America’s four major military services failing to hit enlistment targets in 2023. The military’s recruitment problems are a threat to national security. As some observers have recently pointed out, “America isn’t ready for another war — because it doesn’t have the troops.”

Extended military families source 80% of Gen Z recruits. While the recruitment crisis is multi-faceted, there’s growing concern that political and policy splits have driven down enlistment numbers by reducing endorsements from influential veteran family members.

The 2024 Survey of Military Veterans validates these concerns. The survey, conducted among a nationally representative sample of veterans in August, shows that recent Department of Defense policy changes and dissatisfaction with the direction of the military have drastically reduced the enthusiasm conservative veterans have for recommending service to their family members.

Key Findings

• Conservative veterans are increasingly unwilling to recommend service: The overall percentage of veterans unwilling to recommend service has nearly doubled over the last five years, growing from 20% in 2019 to 38% in 2024. Nearly all of this growth, however, has occurred among conservative veterans. In 2019, only 12% of conservative veterans said they would not advise a “young person close to them” to join the military. In 2024, 47% of conservative veterans said they would not advise a “young family member” to enlist.

• Mistrust of political leaders and DEI policies are “major factors” discouraging conservative veterans from recommending service.  More than 85% of conservative veterans who would not advise military service said “mistrust of political leaders” and “the military’s current DEI and other social policies” were “major factors” in their decision. Pay and benefits, the potential to go to war, time away from family, and the possibility of psychological problems, physical injury or death were far less important, with less than a third of conservative veterans saying each of these considerations was a “major factor” in their unwillingness to advise service.

• Mistrust of political leaders and the possibility of psychological problems, physical injury or death are “major factors” discouraging liberal veterans from recommending service: Much like conservative veterans, a large percentage of liberal veterans (63%) cited mistrust of political leaders as a “major factor” in their decision to not advise service. But liberal veterans were twice as likely as conservative veterans to say the possibility of psychological problems, physical injury or death were “major factors” for not recommending service.

• Most veterans are skeptical of the military’s recent DEI policies. 94% of veterans oppose racial and gender preferences in military promotions and a majority (57%) said DEI efforts are “not essential” for military success. Additionally, while only 14% of veterans said the military pays too little attention to DEI, roughly half (47%) said the military pays too much attention to DEI.

• A majority of veterans think the military is heading in the “wrong direction” but there is a large political divide in perceptions: Three in five veterans overall believe the military is heading in the “wrong direction.” Conservative veterans, however, are nearly 65-points more likely than liberal veterans (89% to 25%) to say the military is heading in the “wrong direction.”

• Liberal and conservative veterans disagree about the strength and focus of our military: While nearly 90% of conservative veterans say our national defense is not strong enough, less than 20% of liberal veterans do. Conservative veterans were also four times more likely than liberal veterans to say the military has become less focused on warfighting and lethality since the time they served. 

• Veterans, regardless of their politics, grade the performance of service members in recent wars highly and the performance of military leaders poorly: 6% of veterans assigned a grade of C or lower to the performance of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan. By contrast, more than one-third gave flag officers a grade of C or lower.

Methodology

The 2024 Survey of Military Veterans was conducted by YouGov between August 19 and September 3, 2024. YouGov interviewed 2,172 veterans who were matched down to a sample of 2,100 to produce the final dataset. Respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The sampling frame is a politically representative “modeled frame” of US adults subset on military veterans, based upon the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, and the 2020 CES surveys. To ensure that results accurately reflect the national population of military veterans, they were weighted by gender, age, race, education and 2020 presidential vote.

For the full sample of 2,100 respondents, the estimated margin of error is +/- 2.1 percentage points. The margin of error for sub-groups is larger.

You can find the full questionnaire here and an extensive breakdown of the results here.