DEI recruiting nightmare: ‘We spent $1 million to get 1 kid in the Army’

'If you're a white male, you're not really a welcome person in the Army right now'

Nearly two million dollars spent by one of the nation’s Army recruiting brigades could not overcome the alienation of potential service members caused by the military’s embrace of radical “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies under the Biden-Harris administration.

After more than two decades of service, Col. Nicholas Braun (a pseudonym) recently retired from the U.S. Army. He spoke to WorldNetDaily on the condition of anonymity, concerned over likely reprisals he would face from the U.S. government for the information he shared with WND.

In 2023, said Braun, as recruiting numbers continued to dwindle through the Biden administration, every corps in the Army was tasked to support Recruiting Command. For example, operations and maintenance funds were diverted to recruiting, he told WND, revealing that over $1 million was so redirected in just the first quarter of last year.

“Do you know how many contracts we got signed?” he asked. “One. After four months, we spent a million dollars to get one kid in the Army.”

In the following quarter, Braun said, six individuals signed contracts after $800,000 of the operations and maintenance budget was redirected toward recruiting. “We used nearly $1.8 million to get seven people in the Army,” he told WND.

Yet, throwing money at recruiting did not solve the problem. Plans to “shrink excess” and reduce its number of personnel from 494,000 to 470,000 by 2029 followed. “In the Pentagon’s infinite wisdom to fix the recruiting problem,” Braun said, in February 2024, “they began another round of restructuring to make the on-hand quantity [of Army personnel] the authorized quantity to be able to say they’re at 100 percent or at least above 90 percent,” he said.

In the restructuring, Braun revealed, “they removed reconnaissance formations from infantry and Stryker brigade combat teams to get the numbers down.” Out of 31 armored brigades, he said, only 13 brigades in the Army with a reconnaissance formation remained.

“When these brigades need reconnaissance, they’re going to pull from formation that don’t have nearly enough training to do the mission,” he told WND, warning that “any real war is going to look like a meat grinder with a whole bunch of under-resourced and undertrained soldiers getting completely chewed up.”

“Why? Because political decisions have been made on force structure instead of capability decisions based on force structure – and it all ties back to the diversity, equity and inclusion stuff,” Braun argued.

“The level of politics in the Army’s general officer corps has elevated to a really unhealthy level,” he added. “Most three-star and four-star generals circle the wagons and throw whoever they need to under the bus to save their own skin.”

“Likeminded one-stars and two-stars get in the club by embracing uniformity of thought at the most senior levels,” he said. “And at this level, they want DEI at the forefront. They want skin color and sexual orientation to be the top priority.”

“If you’re a white male, you’re not really a welcome person in the Army right now,” Braun said, recounting the mandatory Department of Defense stand down and subsequent briefings on the topic in 2021. In one of the briefings, he was told about “the problem of extremism in the ranks.” The focus was primarily on “white domestic terrorists,” he told WND.

Braun said he could not sit quiet at the time, interrupting the briefing to inquire: “How many people have been charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for white extremism in the Army?” To that, the presenter said he did not know. However, he told WND, the answer was “five.”

“Out of 525,000 people, there were five, and they were trying to teach me that white extremism is our biggest problem.”

He pinpointed this moment in history as “the time you begin to see a precipitous drop in Army recruiting numbers.” Which begs the question: “With 70 percent of recruits being white kids from the south and southeast, why would you want to join an organization that’s preaching you’re an extremist or terrorist because you’re white and conservative?”

“The problem is that nobody will acknowledge this is a problem or that we’ve screwed up putting this kind of rhetoric in place,” Braun said. “If Lloyd Austin would come out today, take an in-depth look at the impact [DEI ideology is having] on recruiting and retention, and do something about it, numbers would start looking better almost overnight.”

In the same vein, Braun said, today’s selection of senior military leaders would also need to be addressed. While the Army might be selecting some qualified leaders, they are not selecting the most qualified, he explained: “The overarching feeling in the Army is that DEI is way more important than lethality. Formations are going to have to deploy somewhere, and when they do, many are going to be bringing a lot of kids home in body bags because we’re more focused on this garbage [DEI] than we are actually being able to perform a job at the highest level possible.”

U.S. Army Recruiting Command did not respond to WorldNetDaily’s requests for comment.

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