‘The Defence Force is too woke in 2024’: Military recruitment and the new culture war

Australia has a military recruitment problem, top brass in the Australian Defence Force acknowledge. The ADF is 7% under strength and its workforce is continuing to shrink, Defence chief Angus Campbell admitted at Senate estimates yesterday. Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh has long identified recruitment as a major problem, with a new recruitment partner selected by the Defence Department last October. Back in 2022, Defence launched a six-pronged initiative to improve recruitment and retention in the ranks.

Australia isn’t alone in failing to recruit. The United States armed services have been struggling for a long time to recruit soldiers — in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, the need to retain enough troops for combat operations led to repeated lowering of standards, without great success, eventually leading to “sweeping” changes to recruitment last year, despite US services missing targets by less than in 2022. In the UK, the British haven’t met their recruitment goals since 2010. The Canadians have a major shortfall. The French are struggling. So too are the Germans (insert joke about the war here). Many already allow, or are contemplating allowing, foreigners to serve, as Australia now is.

Australia’s recruitment problem isn’t a recent one. Just before the election, the Morrison government in 2022 announced plans for a massive long-term expansion of the ADF, despite concerns from within Defence that the targets couldn’t be achieved. In 2021, a surge in recruitment sparked by the pandemic turned into a shortfall as unemployment began falling to historic lows — something that has continued under Labor (it’s also a key reason recruitment in the United States is so poor). Shortages of sailors stranded major Royal Australian Navy (RAN) vessels in dry dock for years under the Coalition. The ADF launched a recruitment campaign to address a persistent shortfall in female recruits in 2015. A 2014 auditor-general report found that some important skills categories in the RAN had “experienced sustained workforce shortfalls for over a decade”.

With the problem of military recruitment, especially at a time of shrinking workforces, not merely a persistent one in Australia but among our allies as well, what’s the Coalition’s perspective on the problem that materially damaged Australia’s operational readiness while it was in power?

“This is a weak government and when you signal weakness from the political leadership, diggers, our sailors and our airmen take notice,” according to shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie. “What’s fundamentally missing from this government is a message of service, opportunity and of aspiration. If you go back to 1986, Bob Hawke got in a helicopter and made an ad, which was put on TV, recruiting for Ready Reserve. He highlighted the strategic circumstances, and he made the call to young Australians to step up. We’re not seeing that from Anthony Albanese or Richard Marles.”

That was Hastie on Tuesday, talking to the ABC’s Greg Jennett. When Jennett expressed scepticism that that was the whole story around recruitment, Hastie doubled down. “It’s a tight labour market, no question. But I think people who join the Defence Force don’t just do it for economic reasons, they do it because they love their country and they want to serve their country, and when Defence is being run down, as it is by this government, it sends a signal to a lot of young Australians out there that maybe they should consider service elsewhere, or a job or career elsewhere. So, I think it is on the government.”

So there you have it: recruitment problems are specifically the fault of Labor for not loving Australia enough, for “running Defence down”, and for sending the wrong signal. The fault of Anthony Albanese for not getting into a helicopter. It’s a military version of the argument that Albanese wasn’t being performatively patriotic enough on January 26. It’s now another front in the culture wars.

Indeed, culture wars are never far from the military recruitment issue. Also on Tuesday, Keogh was interviewed by right-wing boofhead Ben Fordham, who repeatedly attacked him for military recruitment addressing “diversity”. “The Defence Force is too woke in 2024,” Fordham, inevitably, claimed.

Except, there’s a familiar ring to these attacks on “diversity” in recruitment. News Corp’s far-right blogger Miranda Devine assailed “gender politics” in army recruitment in, erm, 2017, under the Coalition. Indeed, “wokeness” has been in recruitment for a long time. In 2015, the assistant defence minister, one Stuart Robert, said he was urging Defence to “renew efforts” to attract a “culturally and linguistically diverse workforce”, and said he was urging his department to find an imam to ensure the ADF’s Muslim recruits were properly represented. In what now looks to be a risibly offensive piece in 2009, an Australian Strategic Policy Institute blogger warned the ADF of the risks of “going ethnic”.

But now it’s Labor that’s causing the problem by not being patriotic enough, being too woke, too interested in diversity. Let’s not let the facts get in the way.

What do you think are the real reasons behind low ADF recruitment numbers? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.