The U.S. Army’s recruitment effort is far ahead of schedule for the fiscal year, having topped 30,000 new active-duty soldiers in just a few months, and that’s due in part to the new commander in chief, his Defense Secretary nominee said Tuesday.

President Trump’s pick to head the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, told senators at his confirmation hearing that recruitment has increased since Trump was elected president. He also said there will be a “recruiting renaissance” after Trump takes office and the Pentagon can rid itself of “woke” policies.

“I know the troops will rejoice. They will love it. We have already seen it in recruiting numbers. There has been a surge since President Trump won the election,” Mr. Hegseth said. 

“There’s no better recruiter for our military, in my mind, than President Donald Trump.”

Mr. Hegseth has pledged to make drawing new enlistments into the military a top priority, noting that “our recruitment numbers have shrunk dramatically.” 

Vice President Vance jumped into the fray to castigate senators more interested in Mr. Hegseth’s tattoos than his qualifications to lead the Pentagon.

“I find this grandstanding from Senate Democrats over the Hegseth confirmation perplexing,” he wrote on Twitter. “We haven’t won a war in three decades and we have a major recruitment challenge. Hegseth is assuredly NOT more of the same, and that’s good!”

Mr. Hegseth said the military has long been a “family business.”

“My grandfather served, my father served, I served, my daughter served. The shame is that chain has started to break with generations of people my age and older talking to their kids and grandkids, wondering, pondering, ‘do I want them to serve? Will my country use them responsibly?’ When that kind of doubt is cast, you get serious recruiting problems, like we do right now,” he said.

Over the past few years, recruitment among men has been down. Only two in five young men are deemed both weight-eligible and adequately active to join the military, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Yet women are enlisting in droves. Nearly 10,000 women signed up for active duty in 2024, which is an 18 percent increase from 2023, according to service data reviewed by Military.com. New male recruits still rose, but by just 8 percent, lower than past years.

In fact, enlistments of young men have plunged about 22 percent since 2013, to 45,000 last year from 58,000 men recruited in 2013.

Young men simply aren’t fit enough to go into the military, endless studies have found. A Pentagon study from 2020 found that 77 percent of young men don’t qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, having mental or physical problems, or illegal drug use.

The Army requires just a high school degree, but the service conducts its own test, known as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, which measures skills in math, science, and language.

The problem has gotten so bad that the Army was forced to create a 90-day program called the Future Solders Preparatory course. The pre-basic training program, created in 2022, seeks to aid ineligible applicants who are too fat or don’t meet academic standards. According to military data, 70 percent of the ineligible are men.