Army Posts, History, and the Recruiting Crisis

Since about 2023 nine U.S. Army posts were renamed, the culmination of a process that began in 2019. Perhaps the single most recognized renaming was Fort Bragg-to-Fort Liberty, North Carolina, home of the storied 82nd Airborne Division. The overall renaming implementation was the work of the Naming Commission, called for and established by the national defense authorization acts of 2020 and 2021. Five years later, with the unquestioned need to rectify a serious military manpower shortage and rebuild combat readiness in a demoralized, weakened defense department, the best way forward may be a bit murky. The Trump 47 administration and the present Congress have work to do.

Back to the 2020s. The congressional renaming initiative was the most visible attempt by leftists in Washington to send down the Orwellian memory hole any popular remembrance of once-honored Southern military leaders, those who served under them, and perhaps even the morality of those willing to defend their homes and families – even against long odds – from an invader. Unfortunately, the word “treason” has been used ignorantly and irresponsibly by some – including at senior military grades – and their legacy media allies seeking to justify the wokeists’ attempted annihilation of Southern honor, history, tradition, and culture. Quoting Megyn Kelly: “Do a little research.” Read some history, not a childish fantasy of “Lee and Me.” Doing so could prove a humbling and beneficial experience, as one begins to realize that patriotic, accomplished, honor-bound Americans held differing, studied convictions regarding the Constitution itself, a matter they were willing to fight for.        

Some yawn, asking why does any of this matter today? First, because the United States now has “peer competitors;” and second, the U.S. Army faces a recruiting crisis several years in the making. Especially from 2020/2021 to January 20th, 2025, the Pentagon treated Southern white males as a problem. The sad spectacle has been witnessed in a number of measures but particularly in the disgraceful, demoralizing hunt during 2021 for so-called extremists in the ranks. Although the hunt netted a statistical zero, it carried hidden costs.

Such wrongheaded leadership has undoubtedly contributed to the reluctance of many patriotic Southerners to enter military service or to remain in service. This trend has sobering ramifications on the battlefield, where nearly 32 percent of combat fatalities since 2001 have been – like it or not – Southerners, more than 80 percent of whom were white. To be clear, each and every Service member lost is deserving of honor. But the deliberate adoption of policies that hold in contempt the very demographic that traditionally serves – and dies in combat – at a higher than proportional rate compared with their peers, is beyond foolishness. It is treachery.

I know several outstanding young men who voted with their feet to escape DEI programming in their military “trainings;” many readers will have others in mind. For those interested, a patriotic, professional group founded in 2021, nearly all of them veterans, known as Standing Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services (STARRS), has performed a great service in compiling well over two thousand quoted accounts of military members (including cadets and midshipmen), and family members, who have dealt with the racism, ideological indoctrination, and other elements of the radical leftist agenda. Some have left the military or one of the federal service academies or State military colleges. Others, duly warned, will never volunteer.

While the new Pentagon leadership is committed to restoring common sense, combat capability, and merit-based treatment in the Services, the Trump administration will need to work with Congress on addressing the law that mandated post renamings. For starters, the 2021 act mandated an unending remit, stating the department will continue to identify and remove newly discovered offending “names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia.” Thus, the process has no logical end point. Whether by design or not, the remit recipe fuels and guarantees ongoing divisiveness in the ranks, and morale-killing churn, in the United States Army. That’s not what the country needs for ground combat units expected to close with and destroy the enemy.      

Forrest L. Marion, Ph.D., is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and military historian. He is the author of Flight Risk: The Coalition's Air Advisory Mission in Afghanistan, 2005-2015 (Naval Institute Press, 2018), and (forthcoming), Standing Up Space Force: The Road to the Nation's Sixth Armed Service (Naval Institute Press).