For over a hundred years, Nov. 11 – Veterans Day – has been a day to celebrate and recognize the sacrifice and service of America’s military veterans.
This Veterans Day, as always, calls for celebration of the service and sacrifice of America’s troops. But it also provides an opportunity for the public to learn at a deeper level about America’s troops and who they are.
Over the past year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump have consistently attacked diversity in the military and critiqued military leaders they see as overseeing a “woke” military. Trump has argued that the military “went, in a way, woke” and called for armed forces that would “not be politically correct.”
At a meeting of hundreds of top military personnel at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia in late September 2025, Hegseth claimed the Department of Defense became “the woke department,” infected by “toxic political garbage” and the “insane fallacy that ‘our diversity is our strength.’”
When Trump and Hegseth rail against “wokeness” in the ranks, they fundamentally misunderstand military diversity and undermine veterans.
Today’s generation of veterans is the most diverse in history. Veterans who have served post 9/11 are more diverse in terms of gender and race than previous generations. They are also more likely to have been deployed, seen combat and experienced emotional trauma. In fiscal year 2014, the highest rates of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans were found among Native American or Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
These statistics make clear the gap between the vision of the military the Trump administration desires and the reality of those who have and continue to serve.
Having spent years studying the U.S. military and writing a book on diversity and military recruiting, I know military diversity is a long-standing practice driven by the very nature and history of the all-volunteer force.
Embracing diversity
During times of war and between 1948 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted enlistees to fill the ranks. After years of debate, the draft was ended and the U.S. established an all-volunteer force in 1973.
The demographic makeup of the military quickly changed as more Black Americans and women chose to join the military. In a 2007 study of representation in the military, scholars found that Black Americans had been overrepresented in the military for much of the span of the all-volunteer force. And the percentage of Latino service members more than doubled from the late 1980s to the 2000s.
A 1976 ad in Ebony magazine presents the Navy as a way for Black men to get ahead. Ebony magazine.Additionally, Latino service members made up 25% of new enlistees in 2022.
While women remain underrepresented in the military compared with the U.S. population, the shift to the all-volunteer force led to a steady increase in women’s military participation. Women made up 3% of military personnel in 1973 and 17% in 2022.
The military would not have been able to meet personnel needs and recruitment goals without the disproportionate representation of women, Black Americans, and Latino service members during this post-draft period.
The U.S. military embraced this diversity long before the influence of “woke” politics and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that Hegseth and Trump claim have undermined the institution.
That embracement has helped the military enlist between 128,000 and 190,000 new service members annually since the 1990s, even though some armed forces, especially the Army, have struggled to meet their recruiting goals in the past few years.
Men who have signed up to join the U.S. Marines wait to do qualifying pull-ups in New York City on Nov. 16, 2025. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesExpanding the scope
To fully understand how the military became one of the most diverse American institutions, you need to go back to the foundations of the all-volunteer force.
The primary challenge the military faced in the implementation of the all-volunteer force was how to persuade young Americans to enlist. Large budgets were set aside for advertising, and military branches worked with advertisers to reach potential recruits.
One of the first steps advertisers took in the mid-1970s was to identify “vulnerable target groups.” These groups were targeted based on propensity – the likelihood that an individual would serve regardless of their desire to do so.
The likelihood of service increased when people felt they had little opportunity outside of the military – whether that meant financial struggles or an inability to afford higher education.
Based on ideas of recruit quality and the traits the military sees as best suited to success in the ranks, the military has mostly desired to recruit straight and white young men. But these people were more likely to have opportunities outside of the military. So, military leaders had to expand the scope of potential recruits to reach out to groups previously excluded – namely, Black Americans, other people of color and women.
When Hegseth talks about “fixing decades of decay” in a department gone “woke,” and when Trump argues that the military will now be “all based on merit,” they both fail to understand military diversity.
The military didn’t become diverse because it went “woke” or abandoned a merit-based system of promotions.
Military diversity resulted from the exploitative nature of military recruiting. In the all-volunteer force, the most easily persuaded recruits are those in most need of opportunities they can’t find in the civilian world. The very logic behind an all-volunteer force means that the military can’t fill their ranks with white men alone.
A U.S. Army recruiter walks between outdoor posters at a mobile interactive recruiting exhibit on May 21, 2005, in Charlotte, N.C. The U.S. military has had to reach out to the public to communicate a more effective message and compete with other professions to attract potential soldiers. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images.Central casting
Hegseth and Trump, additionally, have framed their criticism of the military with an obsessive focus on looks.
Hegseth criticized the “bad look” of the current military, saying “it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formations, and see fat troops.” He also railed against “an era of unprofessional appearance” indicated by “beards, long hair and superficial individual expression.”
Trump has consistently talked about wanting military leaders to look like they are out of “central casting”, a phrase he uses almost exclusively to talk about white men.
The firings of Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General CQ Brown Jr., the second Black Chair of the Joint Chiefs, appear to reflect this vision of the military in practice.
When Trump and Hegseth attack military diversity, they harm individuals who made the choice to serve. They also perpetuate the myth that military diversity was enforced from outside the military by liberal “woke” politics rather than born of necessity for the military’s very survival.
Jeremiah Favara is an assistant professor of communication studies at Gonzaga University.
The Military’s Diversity Rises out of Recruitment Targets, Not Any ‘Woke’ Goals was originally published by The Conversation and is republished with permission.
