Free Republic

The Army announced on Tuesday that it "surpassed" its fiscal year 2025 recruiting goal of bringing in 61,000 recruits, and there are still four months left to go. This year’s goal is more than 10% higher than the 55,000 recruits targeted in fiscal 2024, demonstrating a surge in interest and enthusiasm for Army service. Recent recruiting momentum has seen average contracts per day exceeding last year’s levels by as much as 56% during the same period. The Army has not reached its recruiting goals this early in the year since 2014, Army officials said in a statement. Army Chief of...

The Pentagon rolled out a pulse-pounding new ad for Memorial Day weekend, narrated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump, that touted efforts to root out wokeness in the military. Declaring that America’s fighting men and women are “laser-focused on our mission,” the spot shows service members taking part in intense training drills and battlefield combat while dramatic music swells and excerpts from speeches delivered by Trump and Hegseth play in the background. “No more distraction, no more electric tanks, no more gender confusion, no more climate change worship. We are laser-focused on our mission of warfighting,” the defense...

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has released the advance edition of its 2025 Annual Statistical Report, detailing 2024 membership reports. Published by the General Conference’s (GC) Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, the report presents division-level data on baptisms, attendance, and overall membership. As of December 31, 2024, global church membership reached 23,684,237—an increase from 22,785,195 in 2023, representing a net gain of 899,042 members. The East-Central Africa Division reported the greatest increase with over 446,000 baptisms and professions of faith, pushing its membership to more than 5.7 million. The Southern Asia Division and Inter-American Division also posted strong numbers, with...

Russia is recruiting hundreds of Yemeni men to fight in its war in Ukraine by luring them to Russia under false pretenses in coordination with the Houthi terrorist network, a report by the Financial Times found. The Yemeni recruits who were transferred to Russia under a "shadowy trafficking operation" were originally told they would receive high-paying jobs and Russian citizenship. However, after arriving with the help of a Houthi-linked company, many have apparently been coerced into the Russian military, forced to sign fighting contracts at gunpoint and sent to the front lines in Ukraine.

...on DEI as it relates to the “musical mission” of the Air Force.

Is it any wonder recruiting numbers are now through the roof? The US Army just recorded 12 year high recruiting numbers. Why? Well possibly because the military is no longer advertising itself as some sort of LGBTQ+ activist Summer camp. Take a look at this US Army ad promoting health and fitness training, featuring a sergeant doing dead lifts and declaring, “Strong people are harder to kill.” Then compare it to an Army ad under the Biden regime where a cartoon soldier called Emma talks about being raised by two lesbian mothers and “marching for equality” as a child in...

In an astounding display of renewed vigor and patriotism, the U.S. Army has shattered its recruiting goals, marking the most successful enlistment numbers in over a decade. Under the decisive “America First” leadership of President Donald Trump, America’s youth are once again eager to serve, drawing a stark contrast to the dismal figures seen under the Biden regime. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth highlighted the significance of this achievement in a statement to X, revealing that December 2024 saw the best recruiting numbers in 12 years, with January 2025 setting a record not seen in the last 15 years. “In...

The U.S. Army recently announced it shattered previous recruiting records, with December 2024 being the most productive December in 15 years. The branch reported it enlisted nearly 350 soldiers every day that month, Army officials announced Tuesday on social media.

Wokeness is clearly causing much of the military’s recruiting problems.. ... A venerable aphorism is “an army marches on its stomach.” An equally valuable observation is that amateurs talk tactics, but professionals talk logistics. A military that can’t get its troops where it they need to be on time, and that can’t provide them with the food, water, munitions and other gear they need to fight is going to lose. ... the former Ft Hood (now Ft Cavasos) in Texas soldiers weren't being fed. ... The base had only two of its 10 major dining options open every day ......

When Syria’s civil war erupted, Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) recruited, trained, and deployed thousands of Shi’ite fighters to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Among them was the Fatemiyoun Brigade, comprised mainly of Afghans from the country's Shi'ite Hazara minority. From 2011, the IRGC recruited thousands of Afghan migrants and refugees within its own borders and covertly drafted hundreds of Shi'a inside Afghanistan. The majority of Muslims in Afghanistan are Sunni, but around 15 percent of its population -- mainly Hazara -- are Shi’a with religious links to the Shi'ite majority in Iran. With the...

New York Times writer Mara Gay said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that podcaster Joe Rogan was converting angry men to fascism. Gay said, “My thoughts are I hope that women seeing this who are over half the population and vote more consistently than men. I hope that they see this and that they coalesce around the obvious choice. White women, I’m talking to you as well.” She continued, “I just think we really also might want to take a moment to, as Barack Obama did yesterday, speaking specifically to black men, but I think this is actually for all...

AP — About 200 women ages 18-22 from across Africa have been recruited to work in a factory alongside Russian vocational students assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine. In interviews with The Associated Press, some of the women said they were misled that it would be a work-study program, describing long hours under constant surveillance, broken promises about wages and areas of study, and working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. The AP analyzed satellite images of the complex in Russia’s republic of Tatarstan and its leaked internal documents, spoke to...

Calling it a “dangerous practice,” Gov. Andy Beshear signed an executive order Wednesday that bans conversion therapy on minors in Kentucky. Speaking in Frankfort, Beshear said such attempts to alter a young person’s gender expression or sexual attractions have “no basis in medicine” — a view supported by experts in medicine and mental health. Conversion therapy has been condemned by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), among other medical and psychological organizations. AACAP says conversion therapies “lack scientific credibility and clinical utility” and “there is evidence that such interventions are harmful.”

The White House frustrated over what is being called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's backdown... What does 'reform' at the UN Security Council mean?... Israeli air defenses intercepting a medium range missile fired from Yemen... Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meeting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump... British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also meeting... Donald Trump... The US Army met its recruiting goal for the 2024 fiscal year... The Russian military in Syria announcing eight strikes against hideouts of jihadist... Intense Hurricane Helen approaching the northeast Gulf coast... Early today the White House announcing eight billion dollars more in military aid...

Seattle officials have opened up city police jobs to illegal aliens in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. With the Seattle Police Department (SPD) at its lowest staffing level in decades, officials in city hall are looking to take advantage of a recently passed state law that allows jurisdictions to hire non-citizens as police officers. The Democrat-dominated state legislature recently passed Senate Bill 6157, a law that allows jurisdictions to give DACA recipients police powers. One reason the bill was needed is because so many liberal cities have wiped out their police departments with Black Lives Matter (BLM)...

Hamas has started recruiting new terrorists and training them to replace those who were eliminated or injured in the war. Hamas appealed to 18-year-old youths to join the ranks of the military wing, and in recent days security forces have identified attempts to conduct training and preparation for newlyrecruited terrorists. The terrorists that Hamas is trying to recruit are meant to replace around 14,000 terrorists that Israel has eliminated so far in the war, and many thousands more who were injured. A senior security official says: "All the military departments of Hamas are recovering, Hamas is trying to rehabilitate throughout...

he U.S. Army Publishing Directorate released the ALARACT 017/2024, titled, “Utilization of the Army Retiree Recall Program.” The document cites Executive Order 13223 from the Bush administration in 2001. A retiree recall is a “retired Soldier who is ordered to active duty (AD) from the Retired Reserve or the retired list under 10 USC 688/688a, 12301(a), or 12301(d). Per AR 601-10, Recalled retiree Soldiers must be aligned to a valid vacant AC requirement that matches the grade and skill of the retiree before he or she may be recalled to AD,” according to the document. “The retiree population will be...

Faced with a shortfall of more than 7,000 sailors, the head of Navy personnel is tapping into a new population of potential recruits: those who haven’t finished high school.Since 2000, the Navy has not permitted anyone who did not have a high school or GED diploma to enlist in the sea service. But on Jan. 26, the service opened bootcamp to these Americans with some caveats, the Navy announced.Vice Adm. Richard Cheeseman is aiming to enlist at least 500 people who did not finish high school or earn a GED diploma, he told USNI News this week. As of 2021,...

The US Navy had to deliver some bad news last October. Like the other armed service branches, they missed their recruiting goals again. And they missed all of them. By a lot. The enlisted ranks goal for fiscal year 2023 had been 37,700, but they came up more than 7,000 short of that. They missed the enlisted reserve goal by more than 2,000 and fell short by hundreds in the goal for new officers. This forced them to raise the goals for 2024 even higher. But how do they plan on accomplishing that feat?Sadly, they have resorted to the same...

Americans are used to calling their local police and receiving a rapid response. Or at least they were—in some places—some of the time. A case in point is Alameda, California, which like the rest of California, is self-destructing: Alameda is a city located in Alameda County California. Alameda has a 2024 population of 70,742. Alameda is currently declining at a rate of -2.52% annually and its population has decreased by -9.69% since the most recent census, which recorded a population of 78,333 in 2020. The average household income in Alameda is $152,950 with a poverty rate of 6.79%. The median...