Jonathan: We chose this zeitgeist because Bryan and I are both veterans. We want to talk about military culture, and about how authors can use it to write more realistically. Less bad guy, more nuance.
We’re going to give you a lot of context, and we’re going to take shots at each other. It’s going to be a good time.
“Thank You for Your Service” Might Be Going Away
US military recruitment has rebounded strongly since late Biden years and continues to exceed goals under Trump, with all branches meeting or surpassing targets amid the 2026 Iran War.
Biden Administration Context (FY2022–FY2024)
Recruitment faced significant challenges early on. In FY2022 and FY2023 there were major shortfalls, especially in the Army, which missed its goals by thousands, running roughly 15,000 short in one year. The Navy and Air Force also struggled, and levels were the lowest in years, attributed to post-Afghanistan withdrawal perceptions, economic factors, and eligibility issues. FY2024 (October 2023 through September 2024, mostly under Biden) brought a strong rebound, with total accessions rising about 12.5% to roughly 225,000 from 200,000 the prior year, driven by improvements from prep courses, bonuses, and strategy tweaks that started before the election. The uptick predated Trump’s return, per Defense Department data and analyses.
Trump Administration (FY2025–FY2026)
FY2025 (October 2024 through September 2025, a transition year) marked the best recruiting in 15+ years. The Army brought in 62,050 recruits, 101.72% of its 61,000 goal. The Navy brought in 44,096, or 108.61% of 40,600. The Air Force brought in 30,166, or 100.22% of 30,100. The Space Force brought in 819, or 102.89% of 796. The Marines brought in 26,600, hitting 100% of goal, for an overall average of roughly 103% across branches.
FY2026 (ongoing as of July 2026) shows branches hitting goals early, with some goals raised higher, such as the Navy’s 10% increase. The Navy reached 45,000 three months ahead of schedule, and the Army, Air Force, Space Force, and Marines are also on or ahead of pace.
Key factors cited include improved pay, bonuses, and the Future Soldier Prep Course, all built on Biden-era foundations. The Trump and Hegseth emphasis on “warrior ethos,” a reduced diversity focus, and leadership changes also feature heavily, along with economic and job market signals and a surge in patriotism.
Impact of 2026 Iran War
Limited direct data ties the conflict to recruitment spikes. The war began in early 2026 amid US/Israel-Iran tensions. There is no evidence of a major negative hit, and numbers remain robust into July 2026. Some attribute sustained strength to demonstrated military action and “strength” messaging.
Implications for Authors: Geopolitical events like the Iran conflict can boost defense-related book sales, thriller genres, or policy analysis titles. Track DoD reports for real-time data.
Sources
Additional DoD, USAFacts, and branch reports.
Jonathan: The American people aren’t as patriotic as they used to be, but the big holdover was that everyone would say, “Thank you for your service.” No matter who they were, that’s what they said. Lately, that hasn’t been the case.
It’s always awkward when someone says it because they have no idea what I did.
It comes out of the backlash against ICE, or the National Guard going into places, or the fact that the military answers to a commander in chief who happens to be one of the most hated human beings on the planet. There’s a lot of association going on right now.
At the very least it’s segmenting. It used to be across the board. Now the first question is, “Who did you vote for?” MAGA is still strongly pro-patriotic, but a lot of it is done out of ignorance. They see a uniform and say, “Thank you for your service,” to a hobo in the middle of the street. The time of “Thank you for your service” is done.
Different Military Cultures
Jonathan: What Bryan and I want to discuss is the divide between civilian United States culture and the warrior culture of the military. When you join the military, you’re joining a culture, and which culture depends entirely on the branch.
We’re both veterans, but we come from very different subcultures. The Marine Corps is a very different place than the Army. We do different things. Marines go eat stuff, and then the Army moves in and takes care of it. You do not want Marines living in your town.
Bryan: We have a word for Marines. Cannon fodder. You send them in, let them take all the bullets, and then you come in behind them and sweep.
Jonathan: My dad calls us the rocks they load into catapults. Meat shields, meat sponges, we have all the names, because Marines are really good at going in and breaking stuff. We’re hyper-aggressive, we make terrible decisions, and we destroy. Then we leave, because you don’t want us to stay. If you have any questions about that, ask Okinawa.
Our culture comes from what we’re required to do, but also from what we love. I didn’t buy a class ring for high school. I bought one for my boot camp graduation. I wrote an article on my blog called “The Man of Two Rings,” one being my wedding ring and one being my boot camp ring. They represent the two spheres of my life.
I’ll love a woman and be her greatest dream, and I’ll be the worst nightmare of anyone who tries to hurt her. I prepared my whole life for that. I scared some Marines when they dropped profanity around my wife. I told them, “My wife is a lady. I’m going to hurt you, and you know I can hurt you.”
The culture of the Army is something totally different, and sometimes it confuses me. I’m always asking, “Why we aren’t charging?” My brother-in-law is Army, he’s EOD, and he says they just watch Marines go. The Army is about infrastructure, maintaining, and protecting.
Bryan: We do logistics. You win battles with combat power, but you win wars with beans and bullets. The supply systems and the infrastructure get food, ammunition, and fuel into theater.
I was an acquisition officer in Iraq, and the Marines had these real cool things called MRAP vehicles. The Army was driving over landmines in Humvees, and we’d up-armored the outside so it was like a big giant turtle. When you run over a landmine in a turtle, it blows up inside and contains everything. It just kills everybody.
The Marines had big, tall trucks with V-shaped bottoms, so when a mine blows up underneath, the blast gets redirected out both sides. Somebody decided we needed that for everybody in Iraq, not just the Marines, so the Army stepped in and took over the whole acquisition program. They were going to field maybe 10,000 vehicles. We put in 300,000 in a third of the time.
The Marines were the forerunners, though. They tried it, tested it, and proved it worked. The Army systematized it.
The Air Force is a different culture too, but there are common elements across all of them, and one is a core value on leadership. It just gets expressed in very different ways, and those differences can shape how you write a villain or a hero in your book.
Historical Overview
Jonathan: Let’s go over some recent history of how our military is changing, because it’s affecting “thank you for your service,” and it’s affecting the quality of the recruits going in.
Vietnam was a bad time for the military. Nobody liked the military because we were perceived to have lost, and there were a lot of allegations directed at the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen who took part. They were spat upon.
Then we got a resurgence of patriotism in the Gulf War, which we won handily. We destroyed Iraq’s military in a week, maybe two, and recruitment numbers were much better.
Then came the Global War on Terror, and that’s when thank you for your service culture got huge. Everyone was thanking service members, and it was good. A lot of the benefits and the disability programs came up in that period, and we got the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which helped a lot of service members find careers after the service.
Before COVID, the military attracted men who were looking for adventure, because the United States is topographically unassailable. You can’t invade us. To get to us, you have to cross one of two oceans, come through the wasteland of Canada, or come up through Mexico, which presents a whole bunch of its own problems even though it’s probably the most viable invasion vector. Illegal immigration is the worst invasion we’ve faced in a long time.
That safety created a culture where we go to war and war does not come to us. Our most adventurous young men are the ones who join, whether as officers or enlisted, and we go out to war and prove things to ourselves. We’re just about the only ones in the world who do that. Everyone else is fighting wars on their own soil. Russia and Ukraine are being invaded. Europe has centuries upon centuries of being invaded.
In the GWOT era, those young men also used the military to improve their families. We could get house loans. We could go to college. It was a way for the wage slave class to improve their lot if they took advantage of the opportunity.
Then we hit the COVID era, and suddenly we weren’t being adventurous anymore. You were mandated to take the vaccine or be thrown out, and a lot of our most principled young men chose to get thrown out. I’m good friends with a guy who was ejected from the Air Force for refusing it. It was a long three years of “you obey lawful orders” and “this is not a lawful order,” and what it did was reduce the number of principled men in the ranks.
Bryan: It actually did two things. It pushed out the ones who were already in and didn’t want the vaccine, and it kept out the ones who never came in.
My stepson had always wanted to be a Marine. It was his dream, and COVID hit right at his prime enlistment window. He said no. The vaccine mandate was one reason. He wasn’t going to have somebody mandate what he had to stick in his body. The other was the woke culture. He was very disenchanted, and he gave up and never went in. He would have been a great Marine.
Jonathan: At the same time, recruiting was way down because we had a commander in chief who was considered weak. Joe Biden didn’t present well publicly. People don’t want to join the military when the commander in chief looks weak, especially not if you’re an adventurous young man seeking strength. What you got was a bunch of people who joined for the benefits, which is not what you want.
Bryan: It sickens me that the military was using my tax dollars and your tax dollars to do sex change operations for soldiers. People were enlisting because they wanted a sex change operation and couldn’t afford it. It’s elective surgery, and those things cost tens of thousands of dollars, but you could enlist and get it done for free because the military adopted a gender affirmation policy.
Jonathan: Those policies were demoralizing at the same time. Soldiers get one elective surgery for their first term of service, so I wanted to do LASIK, because I’m very blind. If you ever look through my glasses, you’ll understand.
The problem was that I could never get the time off. I was mission essential. I was the senior linguist on the watch floor, all reports ran through me, and I ran most of the intel analysis for southern Iraq during the height of the ISIS conflict.
None of us who were working the mission could get time off for elective surgery. The one person who got it was the one we had to kick off the watch floor because she wasn’t good at her job. That was a shot in the gut for retention, because you can see how the priorities go. The people who don’t do anything are the ones who get the benefits, and the rest of us just work harder because now we have to cover her spot too.
What happened to “Be all that you can be”?
Jonathan: I will say, though, that the Army came up with the best ads in that period.
Bryan: The Marines have always had the best ads. I admit it. The Army ads were another sign of the times.
When I signed up it was “Be all that you can be.” That was a good one. Then we went to “An Army of One.” What the heck is that? We’re not one, we’re a team. It was very individualistic. It pointed at the benefits you can have and the things you can achieve, and the teamwork was de-emphasized. We’ve gone through five more slogans since I got out, and we’d been “Be all you can be” for 100 years.
Jonathan: My favorite was the one right after that, “Army Strong.” It’s almost Frankenstein talking. Army strong, fire bad.
Bryan: The same thing happened at West Point. Part of our mission statement was “To prepare leaders for the Army, to lead people into combat and defend our country.” They changed it to “Producing leaders for our country.” That’s so vague. If you want to be a leader for the country, go to Harvard or Yale or the University of Texas at Austin. If you go to West Point, your job is to get out and lead in the Army.
Jonathan: Recruitment dropped through COVID, and then President Trump got back into office a couple of years ago and the numbers spiked again. I wanted to know how much the Iran conflict was contributing, because typically when we’re winning a war, people want to join and you see a spike. There’s no reliable data yet, only anecdote, so I can’t give you that piece.
What I can point to is Pete Hegseth as secretary of war, which was a great rebranding. The Department of Defense sounds like something very different from the Department of War, and the people who want to join the military for that reason like the Department of War. We like winning.
Bryan: The very first department was the Department of War. We’re just getting back to the original name.
What is zero-defect culture doing to military leaders?
Jonathan: Last year Hegseth gave a military-defining speech to all the top brass across the armed services, and he was redefining the culture. The piece most helpful to authors crafting protagonists and antagonists is the idea of zero-defect culture. Bryan, you were an officer in the Army. Tell me what zero-defect culture is.
Bryan: It crept in over a very long period of time. It didn’t happen in two or three years.
Everybody gets an Officer Evaluation Report at least every six months, and sometimes more often depending on transitions between jobs. If you don’t get top block from your senior rater, your career is done. You’ll never get promoted past that. The result is that soldiers start to think, “I can’t make any mistakes, because if I make a mistake I get a two block or a three block and I’m finished.”
That mindset wrecks leadership. The job of a real leader is to provide everything his team needs, whether it’s a platoon, a battalion, or a division. The training, the equipment, the supplies, all of it, and then to shield them from everything coming down from the top. If it goes well, your team did it. If there was a problem, you own it, because you’re the one in charge.
You don’t get that mindset in a zero-defect environment. You get deflection. “It wasn’t me, it was my platoon sergeant, or my first sergeant, or my sergeant major.”
Jonathan: Take the credit, pass the blame.
Bryan: Which is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.
The other thing that developed alongside it is “Up or out.” You used to have spec fives and spec sixes, not just spec fours, so you could be the best darn tank driver there was and still progress up to E6 rather than getting stuck at E4. You can’t do that anymore. You have to move into leadership, up or out.
The same is true in the officer ranks. If you wanted to make a career of the military, you had to adopt a zero-defect mentality, but the military is about taking risk.
Jonathan: When you de-incentivize risk at the level of the decision-makers, how are we supposed to do our jobs? I’m supposed to go charge that machine gun nest. That’s risky. We want to mitigate the risk, because I don’t want to get shot, but the nest is covering a vital supply route and shooting at Army supply trucks. How are we going to steal anything from the Army if the supply trucks don’t come back? We have to do this.
If the LT says we can’t do anything because it might look bad on his OER, he’s not a war fighter. He’s not a war winner.
Bryan: You can’t win that way. Jonathan said something before we came on camera that I thought was hugely insightful, about the transition that happens when an officer loses somebody.
Jonathan: We had a warning we passed on to our Marines. Never be an officer’s first. Never be his first NJP, never be his first fraternization case, and never be a second lieutenant’s first command.
Our theory was that the way you make a good officer is when he loses Marines. In school they learn theory. Be the best, be top of the class, answer before anyone else, volunteer for everything, push, push, push. It’s a shark tank. When you see young Marine officers around each other, it’s blood in the water. Destroy weakness, be first, because if you’re not first you’re last.
Then they get their first command, and being first and being best causes them to lose Marines. That’s when they stop, and one of two things happens. Either you get zero-defect culture, where the lesson is, I never want that to happen again because it looked bad on my record and my ego can’t take it. Or it makes them good officers, and from then on they gauge the level of risk they’re willing to expose their Marines to instead of gauging what advances their career.
Bryan: You should go see Young Washington. It came out about a week ago, and you’ll see exactly what he’s talking about portrayed in there. Keep in mind that an author wrote that. It fits the historical context of what really happened, but the dramatic presentation was an author’s work, and he captured that idea exceptionally well.
Jonathan: I haven’t gotten a chance to see it yet. Historically, though, that was the defining moment of Washington’s life, the one that turned him into the leader we know. The fearless risk-taker who knew how to take care of his people, who would pray that God would provide for his army but wouldn’t allow them to retreat from the British. He’s complicated.
How do you make a great officer? You do it by losing people. Sometimes you make mistakes, and sometimes you do the best you can and people die anyway. Learning how to absorb that steadies you. It sobers you. It ages you.
Bryan: It’s understanding the consequences, that what you’re dealing with is war and combat and people’s lives, and that it’s not about me and my career and my advancement. It’s about the mission and taking care of the soldiers.
Jonathan: For us it was two things, troop welfare and mission accomplishment, equally weighted. Take care of your Marines, take care of the bad guys, and those mean two very different things.
Bryan: That’s the hard thing about military command. Sometimes you have to make the decision that you’re going to lose people. There’s no way around it, but the mission is higher than that, as long as it’s a worthy mission given to you by the right people.
How do you write a last stand that means something?
Jonathan: I wrote a novel called Semper Die, and this is exactly what I was exploring in it.
Hollywood loves the line, “To the last man.” They love it because the character who says it doesn’t know the men under him, because the writer never did that level of thing. When you know Sanchez, when you know Freeman, when you know Ottinger, and you still say to the last man, it means you’re all aligned to confront something greater than yourselves. You won’t fall back and you won’t step back, because there are thousands behind you who need you to stay. So you’ll stay, and you’ll watch each other die. That’s a powerful moment.
Then you go through the last stand and the people dying are friends, brothers, family, the most precious things in your life. That’s what makes a great version of that story. The casual, blase version that people like to throw out there means you don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know the pain that goes into that kind of loss. Especially as the officer, because it’s your fault. Every life is on you.
Bryan: For the guy with the weapon in his hand, it’s about him and his buddy in the next foxhole. On top of fighting together as a team, you also have to have a basic belief in what you’re fighting for. If you don’t believe in it, you won’t stay.
Jonathan: There must be shared values, and what happens a lot is that the enlisted and the officers have split values.
The enlisted want to go home at 1700, and on Fridays at noon. That’s the goal. Get everything done so we can go home. Officers typically didn’t go home until 1800 or 1900, and God help you if the officer decided you needed to stay too. So you have bad priorities on the enlisted side, “We want to go home,” and bad priorities on the officer side, “I need this on my OER.”
I worked a 13-hour shift overnight one night, 1800 to 0600, and then we PT’d, and our captain decided he needed a mental health seminar at 0900. We were furious because we knew what was happening. He needed it on his OER to show he was taking care of his Marines by bringing in a third-party mental health provider.
I felt bad for the ladies teaching it, because it wasn’t their fault, but they passed around a sign-up sheet that said you came to this voluntarily. None of us signed it. They said, “We don’t get paid unless you sign.” We told them we weren’t there voluntarily, we were ordered to be there, and it was a waste of our time.
I had to sleep. I had work again that night, and instead I was sitting there being yelled at about my mental health. About three quarters of us eventually signed it, for their sake, since we were stuck there regardless. Our captain was extremely upset with us.
Bryan: In that case it sounds like it was his initiative, but another aspect of zero-defect culture is that somebody trips over something and now there’s mandatory annual training for everybody. You stack these things up until you can spend six, seven, or eight days a month doing mandatory training that is all ridiculous. It’s compliance dictated from on high, because the military can’t have you doing anything that might hurt you.
Jonathan: We would have three days of computer work, sitting and clicking through slides on stupid stuff that boiled down to don’t assault people, don’t be openly sexist, and don’t crash your motorcycle. I don’t have a motorcycle. Well, don’t crash it.
We had tricks for it. If you turned on the closed captions, you could read the slides and never watch the videos. Then you took the little quiz, which you can’t fail because you can retake it as many times as you want.
How do you change military culture?
Bryan: There has been a very significant culture shift, and it happens over a long period of time. Part of it is direction from on high, but part of it is thinning out the people who made it to the most senior positions because they were yes men. Your highest ranking general officers, your highest ranking sergeants major. It takes time. You can’t just replace them. You can appoint a secretary of war. You can’t appoint a four-star general. They have to grow.
A lot of this came in during the eight years of Obama. Trump won saying he was going to drain the swamp, but he didn’t understand where the swamp was. He didn’t realize that the people who had grown up under that system and then been promoted into senior leadership were part of the problem.
I remember the chain teaching when we went to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell under Clinton. Before that, the answer was simply that the military is not a place for you if you have different sexual preferences. The chain teaching was mandatory. Read this briefing verbatim, don’t insert any of your own words, and it had to come from the senior leader, which in a battalion was almost always the lieutenant colonel, or the company commander at the lower levels. They had to read it, and you could look in their eyes and they were dead-faced, reading out this policy of what was “right and wrong.”
That thinned out a generation and grew a group of people through the Obama years who were then put into senior leadership positions during the Biden administration. Like it or not, and there are lots of things to like and dislike about Trump, this administration came in and took out that entire cadre of leaders who had grown up in that system.
That’s part of changing the culture across the military. I don’t know whether it’s going to be successful. It’s not the only thing, and it takes more than one presidential term. They certainly came in strong and said we need to change the culture of our military. We have to reinstill a sense of patriotism, that you’re fighting for your country because you believe in your country, not because you believe your country has exploited everybody in history and taken advantage of the third world.
You have to believe your country is good, that we were founded on Judeo-Christian principles of honesty and freedom. We were the first experiment in this. They tried it a little during the Roman Republic, and we modeled a little off that, but we were the first truly successful representative democracy in history.
What does disillusionment do to a soldier?
Jonathan: You can do this with your heroes, your antagonists, and your side characters, and the tool is disillusionment.
Take what Bryan just said about bringing freedom to people in the world. Based on when I was in, I would say half the military doesn’t believe we do that. They would tell me we’re terrible at what we do and we’re not making anyone’s life better. I had to throw stats at them. Did you know that in Afghanistan, for the first time, a whole generation of girls got to go to school? That happened because we were there and we built schools for them. Then Biden pulled us out and the Taliban destroyed all of it. That’s where a lot of the disillusionment comes from. Nothing we do matters.
Bryan: We abandoned in place the Afghans who were helping us. Most of them were killed the next day. We announced in advance that we were leaving on a date regardless of conditions, and that we were leaving behind the people who had helped us. We left them to be murdered. It was criminal.
Jonathan: It hurt our guys, the ones who spent their careers in Afghanistan. The Army built the schools and the roads and the infrastructure. The Marines were fighting in Helmand, taking on the Taliban directly, but behind us was the Army building everything that was going to make life better for the people there.
When we got pulled out against our will, we lost all of it, and the suicide rate skyrocketed. It was awful. I remember reaching out to so many of my guys. Hey, are you okay? Reach out to this guy, I haven’t heard from him in a while. We were all checking on each other because we were losing guys like crazy, because nothing we did mattered.
For a lot of men, joining the military and fighting for freedom is the greatest thing they’ll ever do, until they get out, go to college, get a job, and work nine to five to feed their family. That one time in the military, when you hung out with your bros and drove tanks and fought for freedom, that’s the best you’re ever going to be. That’s how it ended. There was anger, and there was a lot of giving up.
Put that in your stories. If you want to attack your hero, do it through a bureaucratic administration. Do it through someone more concerned with ladder climbing and keeping a clean record than with doing the right thing. When strong men with guns are held back from fighting enemies, you destroy those men. It just eats them.
Bryan: It’s a fourth turning theme, so it’s very relevant right now. If you capture it correctly, it will resonate. I know it will resonate with military people, but I think it also resonates in the broader culture, and you can help re-inspire a new generation of patriotism and give people a country worth being proud of.
Jonathan: Reject the zero-defect culture. Have your characters reject it. Have them be brave and take risks. Have them be strong. Have them choose to sacrifice. Take that young kid, the new PFC in the squad, and have his ideals vindicated. Don’t crush him. Give him the hope and the fighting spirit that will preserve a young man and let him become who he is supposed to be later on.
The stories matter for this, guys. Military culture is shaped by movies. Did you know the military didn’t used to swear the way it does now? Movies in the sixties and seventies came out with a bunch of military people swearing, and all the kids who watched them went into the military and started swearing, and it changed the whole culture.
Bryan: I don’t believe that.
Jonathan: Swearing like a sailor was one thing, but it wasn’t as bad as it is now. I used to correct my guys. There are families over there, so get a hold on your mouth. If you can’t control your mouth, I’m not giving you a weapon. We had some heart-to-hearts, and I got in some fights over it.
Stories and fiction inform a young man or a young woman about what to be in the military. Either they need to resist that culture or they need to become a better part of it. Fiction tells them what they’re supposed to do, which is why military members in your stories, good guys or bad guys, need to be done right.
There are no mwah-ha-ha bad guys in the military. Everybody thinks they’re the good guy. I heard a line, I think on The Good Doctor, that “that’s just reality” is what people say right before they do something wrong. The compromises you feel like you have to make are what makes a bad guy in the military. Well, it’s a zero-defect culture and I can’t have a bad OER. Well, you have to go fight a war, bro.
Bryan: If you’re going to write a military character into your novels, go find one. There are a bunch out there. About 5% of the population is in the military or has been, so go find somebody and talk to them about what it was like.
Jonathan: If you really want to know, understand that this person is going to filter themselves for you. Put them in a room with four or five other veterans and you’ll hear exactly what it was like, because they’ll stop caring about you and start having fun with their buddies.
Bryan: Do it now, because they’re disappearing very quickly. If you know somebody who served in World War II, find them and learn those life lessons. We’re losing that generation.
One of my Amazon ads clients wrote a whole bunch of books on World War II based on interviews with individual veterans, and those books are selling like crazy. He’s making tens of thousands of dollars a month on them. I’m thankful for him, because he’s preserving those stories and they’re important to our national culture.
