Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine general, left, and retired Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the president of Georgia Military College, clap together at the official opening of the school’s NewDay USA Center of Leadership in Milledgeville, Ga., on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. — The nation’s leaders should push harder for America’s youth to participate in public service, including in the military, as the Pentagon copes with recent recruiting shortfalls, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday.

The retired four-star Marine general called on top leaders across the country to implore public service on young Americans as the nation faces an increasingly volatile world and global power challenges from adversaries such as China and Russia.

Mattis visited with some of those young Americans on Thursday during a stop at Georgia Military College, an independent, public kindergarten through 12th grade preparatory school and junior college with associate and bachelor’s degree programs.

“How many times have you heard the elected commander in chief, or your senators, or your governors or other elected officials say, ‘Uncle Sam needs you,’” Mattis told reporters before giving a speech on leadership at the school in Milledgeville, Ga. “I don’t care if it’s the Marine Corps, the Peace Corps, teaching, there’s any number of ways to serve our country … Do we really have an expectation today that each of our young people owes something to the country? I think it’s a lot bigger problem than just in the military.”

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, a retired Marine general, speaks Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, at Georgia Military College in Milledgeville, Ga., as ROTC cadets from the junior college listen. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)

Last year, the Army, Navy and Air Force all fell short of their annual recruiting goals, forcing them to lower their expected force sizes. Recruiting slumped amid the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when recruiters lost access to schools and universities, and it has been slow to recover. Most of the services this year have said they expect to meet 2024 recruiting goals, though those goals are lower than typical of years past.

Recruiters have reported difficulties remain in accessing high schools and universities in some parts of the country, and Mattis said those schools should reconsider their positions on recruiter access. But, he said, national divisions and a historically small population of young Americans eligible for military service were primary drivers of the slump.

Only about 23% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 meet the minimum requirements to enlist in the military, according to the Pentagon. Most cannot meet basic requirements for criminal or drug use history, education and physical standards. An even smaller population has shown any interest in military service, often citing an unfamiliarity with the military or persons who have served.

At Georgia Military College — one day after the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that launched two decades of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan — Mattis spoke with many of the students at the institution and watched as they wrote the names of the more than 3,000 victims of those attacks on brick pavers on the campus.

Mattis said he was “very impressed” watching the young students memorialize those killed in the worst terrorist attack on American soil, years before they were even born. It was the kind of exercise, he said, that can inspire young people toward service.

“That action probably did more to cement in these young people’s minds that bad things can happen, and people can come together and correct them,” he said. “It’s not just talking about it. It’s not just hearing a speech about it or seeing a TV show about it. It’s actually writing down the names of the people, the human beings, who were lost that day.”

The former defense secretary was invited to GMC on Thursday to provide a keynote speech on leadership as the school marked the official opening of its newest facility, a nearly 29,000-square-foot education center dubbed the NewDay USA Center of Leadership. The facility includes a massive auditorium for speakers and performing arts programs and state-of-the-art classrooms, according to the school.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who has served as GMC’s president since retiring from the military in 2013, said he hoped Mattis — who holds a cult-like following among many who have served in the military, especially Marines — would inspire his students to seek out leadership opportunities, whether they go into the military or not. He said about 5% of the prep school’s students traditionally have gone into military service. The school also hosts a college ROTC program and the nation’s largest service academy preparatory program for students seeking enrollment at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., the Naval Academy in Maryland, the Air Force Academy in Colorado, or the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.

Caldwell spent two years working for Mattis in the military, when Caldwell led NATO’s training mission in Afghanistan and Mattis was commanding U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

“He’s just such a great leader of men and women,” Caldwell said of Mattis. “I just wanted [the students] to see that to be a true leader, you’ve got to first have a passion, a heart and a belief that I’m here to put others first before myself. And that, yes, we want to accomplish and do great things, but I’ve got to realize at all times, it’s never about me, it’s about serving you, and that what we collectively could do together.”

In his speech, Mattis reflected on leadership at the time of the 9/11 attacks and in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed. He told the audience that above everything else in his military tenure he learned the power of friends and allies was most important.

Mattis famously broke with former President Donald Trump in December 2019, penning a resignation letter that cited their policy disagreements about the roles of allies, including NATO, and other issues. His sudden resignation came one day after Trump publicly announced he would pull all American troops out of Syria, which never happened.

Mattis penned another public letter in 2020 denouncing Trump as divisive in the wake of the former president’s march across Washington’s Lafayette Square, which saw police and military troops forcibly remove protestors from the park ahead of Trump’s photo opportunity at a nearby church.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Mattis wrote in the June 2020 letter published by the Atlantic. “Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”

Mattis on Thursday declined to directly comment on the presidential election, in which Trump faces Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite his past remarks, he said he believed he should remain apolitical given his position as a retired general.

But Mattis also decried the division that he sees in the country. He said the United States now needs leaders at all levels — from city councils and school boards to the Oval Office — that can bring people together.

“As long as we pull together, as [President Abraham] Lincoln said, nothing can stop us,” Mattis said. “If we pull together, no external enemy can do it, but we’re going to have to pull together and hear the leaders who are going to pull us together.”

He told GMC’s ROTC cadets that he was concerned America’s enemies were happily watching the political division in the United States, hoping Americans would destroy the most powerful county in the world’s history.

“If you lived here long enough, you could start wondering, is this country any good anymore? Are my fellow Americans any good?” Mattis said. “In Beijing and Moscow right now, as they watch some of the things that people are saying about each other in America, you know what they’re doing? They’re saying, ‘Hooray, keep it up, Americans. Keep the hate.

“No foreigner can do it to us. We’ve got to come back together. We’re still the greatest hope for the kids in this country and in every other country — if we’ll come back together.”