The services have huge problems making recruitment goals, because several decades have gone by since our culture looked at military service as a male obligation.
So, the services are using young women to fill the missing ranks, while feminist idiots are trumpeting the "equality" of young women as warfighters. Women in no way can or should be in the ranks of units for direct combat because combat hasn't changed: it is the organized murder of other human beings, close and personal and soul-ravaging.
Young men have enough trouble with that - and as my own experience tells me, it is very hard to do it at first and even harder to stop once you get started. For a long time, it was my job to train those young men and to a degree, I was successful.
The other completely dismissed part of the equation is that sex in a unit is an enormous and unsurmountable distraction. In combat, you are either part of an organized, self-sustaining, cohesive unit, or you are a nonfunctional collection of couples and several very unhappy folks left out. Armed people, with rifles.
If we have to fight a major combatant force, like the Chinese, we will certainly lose if we don't stop selling ourselves fiction and grow the hell up.
...from another web site...a year old but still very very to the point, and frightening as hell....
“Updated May 02, 2019
About 75 percent of America’s 17- to 24-year-olds were ineligible for military service due to lack of education, obesity, and other physical problems, or criminal history in 2009, according to a report issued by the Mission: Readiness group. Since Congress ended the military draft in 1973, the U.S. armed services depend on a constant flow of new volunteers every year. While that figure has since dropped to 71 percent, the problems with military recruiting remain the same. . . .”