A growing number of American service members are warning that under President Joe Biden’s left-wing regime, the U.S. military’s warrior ethos and culture is being destroyed by an increasingly ‘woke’ Pentagon command structure.

The complaints come as the Army has defended its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs this week as “important,” even though the service branch is short thousands of new recruits this year and faces even more challenges over the horizon.

Current and former military members who have put it all on the line for God and country — some of whom served with Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan — say the new focus on “wokeness” comes before emphasis on combat training and effectiveness, Fox News reported.

“The military is extremely woke,” one service member told Fox News Digital in a recent interview, noting the Army’s biggest recruiting shortfall since the advent of the all-volunteer force in the early 1970s.

“I do perceive the Army leadership as woke, and probably the lower enlisted (they have been indoctrinated in school),” another service member told the outlet. “Equity-diversity is another way to divide and control the masses. It does nothing for the warfighter.”

Not surprisingly, Biden’s Army secretary, Christine Wormuth, downplayed the accusation at a Monday discussion with other military leaders on national security and the branch’s modernization efforts.

“We get criticized, frankly, sometimes for being ‘woke,'” she said. “I’m not sure what ‘woke’ means. I think ‘woke’ means a lot of different things to different people.”

Not really. ‘Woke’ means adherence to far-left cultural and societal ideologies over everything else, including what should be most important to an organization — in the case of the U.S. military, that would be becoming the most lethal fighting force on the planet, bar none, as well as creating the warrior ethos to ensure that is the case. Not focusing on proper pronoun use and pretending there are more than two genders.

“But, first of all, if ‘woke’ means we are not focused on warfighting, we are not focused on readiness, that doesn’t reflect what I see at installations all around the country or overseas when I go and visit,” Wormuth said. “I do think we do have a wide range of soldiers in our Army, and we’ve got to make them all feel included. And that’s why a lot of our diversity, equity and inclusion programs are important.”

A growing number of current and recently separated service members disagree, however, though senior members who are still in uniform acknowledge they must be careful about voicing opinions that run counter to the Biden regime’s narratives or they risk tanking their careers.

“Merely questioning the goals or methods used to promote ‘Equity & Diversity’ is punished and that punishment is swift, harsh, and public,” one service member said.

“I 100% believe the military is woke. I see daily minorities, overweight people and women not adhering to military standards,” another said. “Nobody corrects them due to the fear of being fired and labeled a racist or a sexist.”

“Most of us who serve did so because we came from military families. Patriotism and American values are no longer appreciated or expected,” one service member said. “Troops themselves are largely treated as expendable and they don’t even pretend otherwise. Spending 15+ years in the military during wartime with multiple deployments risking their lives only to be tossed out like garbage,” another said.

The Army is on pace to come up 25 percent short of its annual recruiting goal — at a time when there is the largest land war in Europe since the 1940s and China is threatening Taiwan.

Former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hit the nail on the head in assessing the shortfall — it’s the fault of left-wing pundits and Democrats.

“How can we ask young men and women who have decided to risk their lives for America, even die for America, to affirm that our country is inherently racist?” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote for Fox News last month. “How can we ask them to view their brothers and sisters in arms through the narrow prisms of race or gender? The clear and obvious answer is that we cannot – not without putting their lives at risk on the battlefield. A woke military is a weak military. Unfortunately, woke and weak are exactly what our military is becoming under Biden’s leadership.”