Many Americans are “too dumb” or “too fat” to serve in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a gathering of top recruiters at the Pentagon on Thursday, even as he celebrated recent positive recruiting numbers.
“I know it’s not easy on the basic ingredients on recruiting,” Hegseth said. “Too many of our young people are too fat or too dumb — not dumb, that’s wrong. You know, we’re just not educating them properly or they’ve got criminal records, or ADHD, or all these other things.”
Despite this claim, Hegseth went on to say the policies of the Trump administration, which recently included a “warrior dividend” bonus check for the troops, were driving a surge in recruitment, nonetheless, a sign that young Americans want to join a “war-fighting entity, not a woke institution.”
Hegseth has made a point of focusing on physical fitness throughout his time as secretary, competing in a pull-up challenge against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and railing against “fat generals” in a September speech where he instituted wide-ranging new fitness testing.
Whatever impact the Trump administration’s policies are having, the recruitment surge began before Trump took office.
In a dramatic turnaround from 2022, when the Army missed its recruitment goals by about 25 percent, all the service branches hit their targets by the end of fiscal year 2024.
Observers credit the change to a variety of factors, including the waning of the pandemic and the return of recruiters to school campuses, as well as programs like the Army’s Future Soldier Preparatory Course, which assists marginal recruits to improve their test and physical fitness scores to qualify for service.
That momentum has continued since Trump took office.
The military is seeing its highest level of enlisted accessions in the past 15 years, the Pentagon announced on Thursday, and the military branches again hit their recruitment targets in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in September.
The Border Patrol has similarly seen encouraging signs and is training a record number of recruits.
The Trump administration has lavished immigration agencies like the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement with unprecedented funding and hefty recruitment bonuses to fuel its deportation crackdown, though the Department of Homeland Security is reportedly struggling to meet a 10,000-person recruiting goal for early next year because new hires are failing physical fitness requirements.
