Project 2025, a series of policy recommendations for the next Republican president facilitated by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, has moved to the center stage of the U.S. presidential election. The plan’s authors include dozens of conservative from the first Trump administration, while it has been assailed by Democrats.
A Task & Purpose review of Project 2025’s plan for the Pentagon and active duty troops finds a number of starkly partisan changes already pushed by Republicans. But the plan also includes a wide range of day-to-day changes to the force that don’t fit neatly into political labels but would change life in the military. Those include drastically reducing the number of generals, adding 50,000 soldiers to the Army with more planes and ships for the Air Force and Army, and reaching all the way down to the platoon-level in the Marine Corps to mandate how senior a Marine must be to lead a rifle squad.
The nearly 1,000-page handbook includes a 41-page chapter on proposed changes to the Defense Department. The Heritage Foundation describes Project 2025 as a “playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration.” It was produced by hundreds of experts, and the chapter concerning the Defense Department was overseen by former Defense Secretary Chris Miller, who declined to comment for this story.
At it’s heart, the plan claims to be an effort to unshackle America’s military from what the authors view as long-term rot of misspent budgets, politically driven policies and a lack of focus on the military threat posed by China.
“The next conservative President must end the Left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority,” the text says.
Among the changes that follow a clear conservative policy agenda, Project 2025 includes expelling transgender service members from the U.S. military and not allowing them to be recruited; reinstating troops separated for refusing to get vaccinated for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19); and rescinding a Defense Department policy that covers the travel costs for troops who need to go out of state for abortions and other reproductive care – all of which are popular conservative platforms.
But Project 2025 also includes many recommendations for the military that are not talking points for cable news pundits, including reducing the number of general and flag officers while adding more soldiers, planes, and ships; eliminating the MHS Genesis System for recruiting; reevaluating how military families go through permanent change of station moves; and requiring Marine squad and platoon leaders to be staff noncommissioned officers.
Democrats have discovered in recent weeks that many Project 2025 proposals are unpopular with their constituents and have put the plan at the front of their attacks on Republicans In response, Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, but of the over 400 authors behind the document, many worked for Trump in his first administration or on his campaigns and this week he chose Marine veteran and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate, a well-documented friend with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
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That said, a Politico reporter posted on X from the Republican National Convention this week that Chris LCivita, one of Trump’s top campaign leaders, referred to “the Project 2025 team as “a pain in the ass.”
The Heritage Foundation did not provide a comment for this story. Task & Purpose was unable to reach a Trump campaign spokesman for comment.
Task & Purpose looked at how U.S. troops and their families would be affected by several of the changes called for in Project 2025, and what questions these recommendations raise.
Fewer generals at HQ, more staff sergeants in fighting holes
Outside of hot-button political themes, the Project takes aim at personnel and even maneuver-unit topics that are more familiar to service members and their families than the general public.
It also recommends reducing the total number of general and flag officers while simultaneously calling for the Army to add 50,000 soldiers. The Project calls for the Navy to grow from 292 to 355 ships, and increasing purchases of the Air Force’s F-35As to between 60 and 80 per year.
“The number of 0-6 to 0-9 officers is at an all-time high across the armed services (above World War II levels), and the actual battlefield experience of this officer corps is at an all-time low,” Project 2025 says. “The next President should limit the continued advancement of many of the existing cadre, many of whom have been advanced by prior Administrations for reasons other than their warfighting prowess.”
Project 2025 does not mark the first time that an organization has expressed concern about how the proportion of general and flag officers to enlisted troops has gone up over time. In 2010, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered a reduction of generals and admirals, but this effort was only partially implemented, according to the National Defense University.
Far below the level of generals and admirals, Project 2025 calls for having older and more experienced Marines lead squads and platoons, an idea the Marine Corps considered several years ago.
Specifically, Project 2025 recommends that the Marine Corps “Align the USMC’s combat arms rank structure with the U.S. Army’s (squad leader billets are for E-6s, and platoon sergeant billets are for E-7s).”
Because most Marines do not stay past their first enlistment contract, the Corps has a much smaller number of staff noncommissioned officers than the Army. It is common for corporals or even lance corporals to serve as squad leaders.
Marine veterans told Marine Corps Time in 2016 that the Corps would have to vastly increase the number of staff sergeants to have them lead all infantry squads, and there was no proof that the Army’s model for combat arms rank structure was better than the Marine Corps’.
Though Project 2025 is light on deployment advice, it appears to endorse military operations at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying the Pentagon should “provide necessary support to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) border protection operations.
In spring 2020, Trump proposed to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper that the U.S. military deploy up to 250,000 troops – more than half of the active-duty Army – to the southern border, according to the New York Times.
The Defense Department already provides assistance to DHS for border protection with several thousand troops for detection, monitoring, aviation, planning, warehousing, logistics, training support, along with funding and active-duty National Guardsmen for counter-narcotics efforts, according to the Pentagon.
Family Life
Some of the personnel changes that Project 2025 proposes are ideas that have been discussed in the past, said Katherine Kuzminski, director of the military, veterans, and society program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.
Project 2025 calls for evaluating “the military family holistically when considering change-of-station moves.” It does not elaborate on how this might change PCS moves. Several issues commonly discussed by military families as PCS hardships include licensing and professional credentials for spouses, childcare and distance from families, though none of those or any other specific policies are mentioned in Project 2025.
However, Project 2025 does tackle the impact that PCS cycles take on families.
“It’s something that comes up perennially,” said Kuzminski, who added that the military services have looked at the issue with varying degrees of success. “It’s something that quite honestly, military family organizations have raised multiple times in the past because there is a sense of building stability and patterns of spouses having careers.”
The current PCS system, which requires troops and their families to move every few of years, dates to the Cold War, when roughly one third of American forces were stationed overseas, Kuzminski said. The system is based on the assumption that military families would want to return to the United States after spending two to three years aboard. At the time, it was not common for both spouses in military families to work.
Promotion boards also tend to favor service members who have served in multiple assignments, Kuzminski said.
However, military families are now much more concerned about the implications for their children about having to move so often, she said. Given the increased costs of living, it is common for both junior enlisted service members and their spouses to work.
“We are seeing implications in retention when it comes to having them move every two to three years,” Kuzminski said. “At a certain point, spouses are sitting down and making the calculus. If you’re a male officer with a female wife who is on the partner track to a law firm, well then, the calculus for the family ends up being much more difficult than in the 1950s, where you could expect that the spouse just trail and their career would either take a back seat or go away all together.”
Recruiting: in with high school ASVABs, out with MHS Genesis
To improve recruiting, Project 2025 calls for requiring schools to administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, to students. It does not specify how the tests would be implemented or what the Pentagon would do with the results.
It also recommends, “Suspending the use of the recently introduced MHS Genesis system that uses private medical records of potential recruits at Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS), creating unnecessary delays and unwarranted rejections.”
Adopted in 2022, MHS Genesis has made it more difficult for people to join the Army by flagging minor health issues as potential disqualifying medical conditions, Military Times has reported.
Regarding recruiting, Kuzminski said she does not believe it would be controversial to require schools to administer the ASVAB. The Defense Department and military services are doing everything within their control to remedy recruiting challenges, but one of the issues they face is that many young Americans are not aware that the military is an option for them.
She also acknowledged that MHS Genesis has been problematic, but the challenges involve more than the system itself.
“Prior to the implementation of the MHS Genesis system, we were clearly not receiving the full medical history of individuals, and the challenge is not that we have this software that now effectively traces that over time, it’s that we don’t have the medical professionals to walk through the waiver process that we need to staff all that new information that we have,” Kuzminski said.
Fighting the Culture Wars
Several of the recommendations that Project 2025 calls have long been espoused by conservative lawmakers, such as restricting abortion. Following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that ended federal protections on abortions, U.S. service members stationed in several states suddenly had no access to abortion care.
The Defense Department responded with a policy to pay the travel costs for service members who needed to go out of state for all reproductive care, including abortions. That prompted Sen. Tommy Tuberville (D-Ala.) to block hundreds of military officer promotions for 10 months before finally relenting.
Under Project 2025, no public money could be used “to facilitate abortion for servicemembers.”
The Defense Department’s current travel policy does not pay for medical care itself, nor does it limit what type of reproductive healthcare troops can receive. Defense Department civilians have access to reproductive care through their employer-offered health insurance, not direct department funding, said Maj. Geiger, the Pentagon spokeswoman.
Project 2025 also calls for reinstating troops who were separated for refusing to get vaccinated for COVID-19 during the Defense Department’s mandatory vaccine program. Those service members would also be restored to their appropriate rank and receive back pay.
Lawmakers such as Rep. John Rutherford (R-Fla), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have been pushing for troops who were forced out of the military for refusing the vaccine to be welcomed back into the ranks.
But CNN reported in October that only 43 of the roughly 8,000 U.S. service members who were separated for refusing to get vaccinated had rejoined the military since the mandatory vaccination policy officially ended in January 2023. The Army, which has faced recruiting challenges, sent letters last year to about 1,900 soldiers who had been separated for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine about how they could return to service.
Reinstating service members who were separated for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine also puts commanders in a tough position, said Risa Brooks, a political science professor at Marquette University in Wisconsin
When the Defense Department’s mandatory vaccination program was in effect, commanders said it was needed for health reasons, Brooks told Task & Purpose. By bringing back troops who refused to comply, commanders would be saying the vaccine was a political rather than a health issue.
“Of all of the important issues facing DoD, to focus on this one seems much more about politics than about thinning about readiness and the core issues facing the department going forward,” Brooks told Task & Purpose. “What it really is doing is trying to inject partisan politics into the military, which has been an ongoing pattern for some time.”
Project 2025 continues to carry the mantle of anti-woke and it calls for reviews in the curriculum of both military service academies and Defense Department schools.
Transgender Ban
In January 2021, President Joe Biden rescinded the Defense Department’s policy on transgender service members that was enacted under the Trump administration, which banned transgender people from serving in the military if they had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria unless they had been medically stable for 36 months and had not begun medical treatments to transition to a new gender.
The Project 2025 proposal on transgender service appears to go further than Trump’s original transgender service member ban by recommending that all troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria be “expelled from military service” because, “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”
The Defense Department does not track how many transgender service members are currently serving in the military, a Pentagon spokesperson told Task & Purpose.
Banning an entire demographic from serving in the military would hurt both recruiting and retention, said Army Maj. Kara Corcoran, vice president of SPARTA Pride, an advocacy group for transgender troops.
Transgender service members are already serving in key leadership positions, including at least five company commanders as well as dozens of O-4s, several O-5 and O-6 officers, and enlisted leaders, Corcoran told Task & Purpose. The military has invested a lot of money into training them, especially if they serve in the higher ranks.
“You’re now forcing a company commander to figure out: How do I replace them – how do I replace a squad leader that I’m now being forced to chapter?” Corcoran said. “You are going to reduce our ability to be ready to fight, and then the tertiary effect of that is recruiting and retention. You’re going to continue to erode our ability to take in the citizens of this country that have no issue with transgender people.”
Corcoran said she has no doubt that if the transgender ban recommended by Project 2025 is ultimately adopted, it will mark the end of her military career. Although legal challenges to such a ban would be inevitable, they would take years to work their way through the courts, and the Supreme Court would be likely to side with the executive branch.
“There’s nothing in law that protects us,” said Cochran, who added that she is concerned the wider movement against allowing transgender people to serve in the federal government could prevent her from working for the National Park Service if he is kicked out of the Army. “So, I’ll go be a sheriff in Denver, or something like that.”
War on ‘Woke’
Project 2025 hammers at a favorite talking point among conservative lawmakers, that the military has gone “woke.” The plan calls for reviews in the curriculum of both military service academies and Defense Department schools.
One proposal would require the Defense Department to, “Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.”
The text does not provide examples of Marxist teaching or the presence of critical race theory in military academies or DoD schools.
In addition to auditing the courses at the service academies, Project 2025 also calls for eliminating tenure for academic professionals. It would also require the military to “remove all inappropriate materials” and “reverse inappropriate policies” from curricula and health policies in Defense Department schools.
The Department of Defense Education Activity, or DODEA, uses College and Career Ready standards curriculum for all DODEA schools from pre-kindergarten through high school, said Army Maj. Grace Geiger, a Pentagon spokeswoman. More than 40 states and four territories also use these standards.
“Importantly, within the DoD, procurement rules for solicitations for DoDEA’s curriculum materials and learning resources must include standard language requiring materials to be free of any perceived bias and present balanced coverage of content,” Geiger told Task & Purpose.
As a result of DODEA using these standards, students in Defense Department schools scored highest in the nation on the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” Geiger said.
“Specifically, fourth and eighth-grade students attending DoDEA schools led the nation on the 2022 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments, significantly outperforming the national average,” Geiger said “Importantly, pandemic learning loss did not significantly impact DoDEA as students’ average scores increased, while national average scores significantly decreased.”
Task & Purpose reached out to all the military service academies regarding Project 2025’s statements about indoctrination. Representatives from the three academies had similar responses.
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s directorate of communications issued a brief statement: “The U.S. Military Academy does not speculate on policy proposals.”
Navy Cmdr.Ashley Hockycko, a U.S. Naval Academy spokeswoman, said the academy does not comment on partisan political matters.
“The Naval Academy is focused on developing and educating midshipmen to be critical thinkers who can analyze issues from multiple perspectives and contexts; our focus is on how to think, not what to think,” Hockycko said.
The U.S. Air Force Academy also does not comment on “external studies,” an academy spokesperson told Task & Purpose.
“We continue to accomplish our mission of developing leaders of character ready to serve in the Air Force and Space Force,” the spokesperson said.
Brooks said there is not any evidence to substantiate accusations that the military has gone “woke” since Biden took office.
“With all the challenges facing the military and the complicated international environment it’s operating in, to have to be contending with these efforts to politicize it is really not helpful, and, I would say, a big distraction,” she said. “If elected leaders or public officials or the public really want to help DoD, it would be better to focus on issues that require real attention.”