Harpy Daniels drags US military recruitment challenge into the spotlight

A series of drag queen TikTok videos aimed at encouraging Americans to enlist draws mainstream ire.

Joshua Kelley launched a series of TikTok videos in which he appeared as his alter ego, drag queen Harpy Daniels. Picture: US Navy/Instagram

The US Navy suffered harsh criticism this month after Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley became one of five “digital ambassadors” for the service, launching a series of TikTok videos in which he appeared as his alter ego, drag queen Harpy Daniels, to encourage young Americans to join the service.

Republican senators, former marines and much of the American public were shocked that the navy employed drag queens, let alone endorsed them to boost recruitment, which is expected to fall 8000 short of its 38,000 target this year.

“We are concerned about both the promotion of a banned app and behaviour that many deem inappropriate in a professional workplace,” Republican senators shot off in a letter to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro.

Kelley, who identifies as non-binary, has said he first started performing in 2017 on the USS Ronald Reagan at a designated morale, welfare and recreation lip-synching contest, and insists he has been critical in reaching out to Gen Z.

“I’m an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community and being able to do drag is not just for me but a tribute to many service members who were kicked out, harassed, bullied or worse for being openly gay during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” he said in an interview with the USS Constitution Museum in Boston, referring to the world away of Bill Clinton’s presidency when sexuality was officially ignored.

The navy, which at first defended the promotional decision publicly, later denied Kelley was part of any formal program. Regardless, the fracas put a spotlight on the US military’s struggle to meet its recruitment targets at a time of heightened international tension.

“For the army, I think it’s close to a crisis,” says Mark Cancian, a senior adviser on the US military at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s been a huge problem for years. For the other services it’s a serious problem.” The US military, which has about 1.35 million active-duty personnel spread across the navy, air force, army, marine and space forces, requires more than 155,000 new recruits this year to replace departing personnel.

For comparison, Australia’s active-duty military personnel number about 60,000, China’s about 2.2 million, Russia one million and Britain about 145,000.

“The army alone wants to be at an active duty and strength of about 485,000 and they’re down to about 452,000 because of recruiting and retention problems – that’s a big dip,” Cancian says.

Indeed, waiting for hours last week outside two army recruitment stations – at Times Square in New York City and in downtown DC, two of hundreds dotted around the nation – Inquirer didn’t see a single potential recruit enter.

The US military, especially the army, is facing the toughest recruiting environment since the end of the draft and the start of the all-volunteer force in 1973, a perfect storm of low unemployment and steadily declining patriotism, fitness and interest among young Americans.

Covid-19 made all this even worse, says Katherine Kuzminski, director of the military, veterans, and society program at the Centre for New American Security in Washington.

“The services have relied so heavily for a long time on the presence of recruiters in high school campuses and to a lesser degree on college campuses,” she says, pointing out that the army missed its recruitment target last fiscal year by 15,000 recruits, or roughly 25 per cent of what it needed.

This month Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told congress the force would miss the 2023 target of 65,000, too. “We are doing everything we can to get as close to it as possible; we are going to fall short,” Wormuth said.

The robust recovery in the US labour market, where the jobless rate, as in Australia, is skirting multi-generational lows of 3.5 per cent, has provided young Americans with other, less risky, career options, especially as America’s foes, primarily China and Russia, loom larger in the public consciousness. “What the military recruiting needs is a really good recession,” Cancian says.

The days of US troops making their Australian counterparts envious, which prompted violent riots in Brisbane during World War II, are long gone.

New US Army privates, the lowest rank, earn about $US22,700 ($34,760) in their first year in base pay, about 40 per cent less than the equivalent Australian ranked soldier earns after adjusting for the exchange rate (the cost of living varies widely across the US however). The low headline figure obscures, in both services for that matter, the significant array of extra benefits such as housing, healthcare and education, and six weeks of annual leave in the US case, significantly more than most Americans enjoy.

“If you compare US military salaries with salaries of civilians with equivalent education and experience, the military is paid more than almost all of them, up in that 90th percentile,” Cancian says. The US government also lifted military pay by 4.6 per cent across the board this year to help compensate for record inflation, the biggest nominal increase in 21 years, a benefit few private-sector workers enjoyed.

If economic factors have been a sudden drag on recruitment, social factors have been a slow boil.

In a statement to Inquirer, the army says 71 per cent of youth don’t qualify for military service “because of obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct and aptitude”, far more than a generation ago.

“We’ve seen in recent years an increase in the use of ADHD medications, rising obesity rates, all leading to physical fitness challenges for potential recruits,” Kuzminski says.

US soldiers at Camp Kosciuszko in Poznan, Poland, in March. Picture: AFP

The army has refused to lower its entrance standards surrounding body fat composition or academic merit, although it did relax a tattoo policy last year to allow recruits to have some tattoos, no longer than 2.5cm, on their hands or the back of their necks or both.

It also launched a pilot future soldier preparatory course to help interested candidates meet the academic and fitness thresholds. This has helped 3200 new recruits meet basic standards across fitness and education tracks. “It’s a holistic health approach, nutrition, diet, mental health aspects, those types of things,” says US Army public affairs director Jodi Witt, an 18-year veteran of the service.

Fit Americans are less interested in serving, too: the share of 16 to 21-year-olds across the US (the age of the vast bulk of new recruits) who say they will be serving in the army “sometime in the next few years” has declined from 15 per cent to 9 per cent across the 20 years to 2022, according to regular Defence Department polling. For males, the drop has been more stark, from 23 per cent to 11 per cent.

A prominent survey of Americans published in The Wall Street Journal in March revealed a huge drop in traditional values – patriotism, religion, family, community service – since 1998, especially among young people. Overall, only 38 per cent of respondents said patriotism mattered, down from 70 per cent. The generational gulf this year was stark: 23 per cent of adults under 30 said patriotism was “very important” compared with 59 per cent for those over 65.

“The only priority the Journal tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money, which was cited as very important by 43 per cent in the new survey, up from 31 per cent in 1998,” the paper said, in what was a depressing read for anyone with traditional values.

The declining visibility of the army in daily life and family hasn’t helped: only about 1 per cent of the US population currently serves and the veteran population is declining as the big wars of the past – World War II, Korea, Vietnam – fade into memory. Witt, who spent 10 years in the air force and then eight years in the army, extols the virtue of service but concedes the US military “is becoming more of a family business”, pointing out how 79 per cent of recruits have a relative who served. “You’re part of something that is bigger than yourself … it allowed me to grow and do things I normally wouldn’t have done, gave me those opportunities to get outside my comfort zone … it’s been really rewarding,” she says.

“I just had a nephew enlisted in the army and I think it kind of transformed him into a man.”

Was the navy’s TikTok promotion its own Bud Lite moment? The owner of the famous US beer used trans woman Dylan Mulvaney to advertise its mainstream conservative brew in April, only to suffer a sharp fall in sales and relentless attacks from traditionalists.

“I think it was a very unwise move,” Cancian says of the navy’s notorious TikTok video. “Whether it has a major recruiting impact, it’s hard to say.

“It’s not that recruits are necessarily politically conservative but hard work, punctuality, these aspects of life are individually conservative traits. I don’t know what the navy was thinking.”

Kuzminski says the unorthodox promotion and pushback opened the flood gates for criticism that could confirm biases about the military, be they that it is too woke, or still too old-fashioned.

“It’s become a distraction, even though it was positively meant to show the military as an inclusive environment,” she says.

The US military’s recruitment struggles appear largely unfixable, a symptom of America’s wealth, cultural and political development. America’s adversaries, from Russia and China to Iran and North Korea, will suffer these problems only if and when they catch up.