This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitabasu. Today, the U.S. military's recruitment crisis.

The United States military is the most powerful and lethal force in the world.

It has an annual budget of more than $800 billion, far more than any other nation spends on its military.

But there's a simmering crisis at the heart of the American Armed Forces.

It's a long-term cultural, societal trend. People don't want to join the military.

That's New Yorker's staff writer Dexter Filkins.

At the height of the Vietnam War, early 1970s, the military had three and a half million members.

Now it's 1.3 million. And the military keeps getting smaller.

Every year it's getting smaller.

And that's because they can't get enough people.

Dexter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has spent decades covering the U.S. military,

including from the front lines during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

His book, The Forever War,

won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 2008. That's all to say,

he is someone who's uniquely positioned to understand both the military's opportunities

and its weaknesses. In his latest piece for The New Yorker, Dexter writes about the state of the military today,

and one of its biggest problems right now, recruitment.

We spoke about the roots of this crisis, what the current administration plans to do about it,

and what it could mean for American security in the future.

When you had the draft, World War II, etc., through the Cold War, until the 1970s,

typical citizen thought, it is part of my responsibility as an American to defend this country

if I have to and to fight for this country if I have to. When the draft was done away with,

...