I spend my time talking to the executives and operators building America's defense industrial base. They all tell me a version of the same story.
A factory has 20 open roles on the floor. CNC operators. Technicians. Quality inspectors. The pay is good. The contracts are real. The work matters.
They get a bunch of applicants.
Most can't pass the entry math test. Of the ones who do, a meaningful share can't read the technical manual without help.
And unfortunately, it is the entire defense industrial base.
And the reason this is happening did not start on the shop floor. It started in a fourth grade classroom fifteen years ago.
What happened?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the gold standard for tracking how American kids are actually doing. Federally administered. Run since the 1970s. Apples-to-apples across decades.
Here is what it says:
In 2024, twelfth graders posted the lowest average reading scores since the assessment began in 1992. Math hit the lowest level since the current framework started in 2005. Thirty-two percent of high school seniors are now "below basic" in reading. Forty-five percent are below basic in math.
"Below basic" means they cannot reliably identify the main idea of a paragraph or solve problems involving fractions. These are 18-year-olds.
Long-term trend data is worse. Nine-year-olds' reading and math scores in 2022 had fallen back to roughly where they were in the early 2000s. Two decades of progress. Erased.
The decline did not start with COVID. COVID simply exposed it. The slide began around 2013, and the steepest drops are concentrated among the lowest-performing students. The gap between the top and bottom of the distribution is now the widest on record.
And yet, GPAs keep going up. Between 2010 and 2022, high school GPAs in core subjects rose every single year. By 2022, nearly nine out of ten ACT test-takers received A or B grades in their core courses.
We lowered the bar and then painted over it.
How we got here
It wasn't by accident.
The accountability era collapsed. No Child Left Behind tied federal funding to test performance in 2002. Incentivizing schools to narrow the curriculum, game the system, and strip instruction of anything that didn't show up on a bubble sheet. Then in 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act handed accountability back to the states. The states, predictably, lowered their cut scores, redefined proficiency, and inflated their numbers. The federal government stopped looking. The states stopped trying.
California's 2023 Math Framework is the clearest live example of the pattern. The state, which educates more K-12 students than any other and effectively dictates what shows up in textbooks nationwide, approved a framework that delays algebra, promotes "data science" courses as substitutes for algebra-intensive sequences, and pushes detracking in the name of equity. Students who don't reach algebra by eighth or ninth grade have almost no realistic path to calculus by twelfth, which means almost no realistic path to engineering, physics, or computer science.
In practice, it locks the bottom half of the distribution out of every advanced STEM pathway in the country. The students with private tutors will be fine. The students relying on public schools, the ones the policy was supposedly designed to help, will not.
The defense pipeline is in trouble
The Department of Defense's own research on the STEM talent pipeline lays it out plainly.
- About 16 percent of high school graduates are "STEM-ready."
- About 20 percent pick STEM majors.
- About half switch out before graduating.
- About 60 percent of the survivors take non-STEM jobs.
Multiply it out: roughly 3.2 percent of American high school graduates end up in the STEM workforce.
That is the pool. That is the entire pool. Every defense contractor, every national lab, every semiconductor fab, every space company, every AI infrastructure team, every shipyard, every cyber unit is drawing from the same 3.2 percent.
And that pool is shrinking.
What the military is seeing
In 2022, General James McConville, then Army Chief of Staff, told Congress that only 23 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 qualify for military service without a waiver. A decade earlier, it was closer to 30 percent. In 2025, a senior Army official told Military.com that only about 8 percent of American youth qualify for a "clean enlistment," meaning no waivers, no remedial courses, no exceptions.
The headline disqualifiers are obesity, criminal records, and drug use. The quieter one is academic. Pentagon officials have publicly attributed part of the disqualification rate to falling ASVAB scores, which they tie directly to public school performance. ASVAB scores have dropped by as much as 9 percent since COVID-era school closures.
Then layer in willingness. A recent survey found that 87 percent of 16- to 21-year-olds are "probably not" or "definitely not" considering military service. Combine eligibility with willingness, and roughly 1 percent of American youth are both qualified and inclined to serve.
That is the recruiting pool. One percent.
The roles most affected are not infantry. They are the technical ones.
Consider the Navy Nuclear Field, the pipeline for the sailors who operate the reactors aboard America's ballistic missile submarines, attack submarines, and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Applicants must have completed at least one full year of high school algebra. They need a combined ASVAB line score of 252. Those who don't qualify on the ASVAB alone take the Navy Advanced Programs Test, which covers chemistry, geometry, trigonometry, algebra, probability, and physics. Then they go to Nuclear Power School in Charleston, six months of reactor theory, thermodynamics, and electrical engineering at the intensity of a STEM degree compressed into half a year.
Now superimpose what NAEP says. Forty percent of 8th graders below basic in math. Seventy-eight percent of 12th graders not proficient. The bottom decile collapsing.
The submarine-based leg of the American nuclear triad depends on a pool of teenagers who can pass algebra. That pool is shrinking. Virginia-class submarine production has lagged its two-per-year target for several years. Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine construction is behind schedule. Munitions production lines for Patriot interceptors, Stinger missiles, and 155mm artillery shells have all struggled to ramp up. The bottleneck is not capital. It is people who can do the work.
In 2009, the retired-flag-officer coalition Mission: Readiness issued a report warning that 75 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds were already ineligible to serve. Rear Admiral James Barnett, in that report: "Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent on what's going on in pre-kindergarten today."
That was sixteen years ago. The figure today is 77 percent.
The bill is due
A nation that cannot teach its children to read cannot defend itself. Not because reading is the point, but because everything downstream of reading — including the ability to operate a reactor, maintain a fighter jet, or write the code that runs a satellite — requires a population that can think.
The fix is not mysterious. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida committed to phonics-first reading, rigorous math, and honest measurement. Mississippi pulled its 4th-grade reading rank from near the bottom of all states to the middle. Louisiana was the only state to score above 2019 levels in reading on NAEP 2024. The blueprint exists. The question is whether the rest of the country has the institutional honesty to admit what isn't working and the political courage to fix it.
In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk. The line everyone remembers:
"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
That was forty-three years ago. The data are worse now. The unfriendly foreign powers are real.
That is what national security looks like when the talent pipeline collapses.
We are watching it happen in real time.