Every branch of U.S. military struggling to meet its recruiting goals
nbcnews.com
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They ended up blacklisting me for a medication I was on before I was even a teenager. My stepbrother faced similar issues, but with ADHD medication, he was able to get it cleared, while I wasn't. I'm glad I didn't get in tbh, I was close to losing a decade of my life in bumfuck nowhere for a $40k signing bonus.
I also have to laugh at the ads. I keep seeing this airforce ad that shows all sorts of cool looking stuff, but the only people I know in the military that had "interesting" jobs were also the most vile. My brother got in and they gave him basic RF and EE training, and for a while I thought he was going to learn a useful skill... He listens to radio static for 12 hours. He's got himself into the academy though, with ambitions of being a pilot, but we'll see how it works out.
Another friend of mine joined the army for economic reasons, he's mostly satisfied, but early on complained to me that he couldn't do the job he was trained to do until some civilian contract ran out. His job? Running LRUs through some diagnoses machine and writing reports.
The one thing I will say is the benefits are amazing. I'm convinced the only type of non-traditional students universities give a damn about are former military coming back with their GI Bill.
https://amp.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article259392144.h...
I wonder if there is some critical mass of integrated differences wherein tribalism re-nucleates and the sub-groups abandon the larger umbrella.
This, combined with fertility rates and population level mental health all point to an empire in decline. I would give it 1-200 years before collapse, all empires have.
To me this sounds exactly like the current tension between federal and states rights in America.
https://www.wilpf.org/racial-discrimination-in-new-zealand-m...
But that's exactly my point. Few people believe the military advances those values.
Edit: To clarify, when I wrote "their interests", I meant including collective interests, i.e. those of the group or nation, whose defense is usually lumped under "patriotism".
This seems surprising given how much I associate all the "support our troops" rhetoric with the right. And actual military funding, although that's more a function of campaign contributions from defense contractors and otherwise unprofitable states.
Yes, the right does support the military more than the left. But they're starting to realize this support is one-sided. The number of people on the right that still believe bombing the middle east is vital to America's security is shrinking [1], while at the same time the military is demonizing its support base with training calling whites inherently evil [2].
[1] Trump to West Point grads: 'We are ending the era of endless wars' - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-wars-idUSKBN23K... - While he did try to start a war by assassinating Soleimani, his boasting is proof that ending foreign wars is gaining popularity on the right.
[2] https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/ex-space-force-commander-dod-v...
That is an article where a guy is certainly trying to sell a book that's alleging a generic far right conspiracy theory about "neo-marxism".
I doubt there's any evidence.
“One Marine told us that military history training session was replaced with mandatory training on police brutality, white privilege, and systemic racism. [..] Another servicemember told us that their unit was required to read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo which claims, and this is a quote, ‘white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist world view,'” Cotton added. - https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/1...
The defense secretary being questioned did not deny these assertions. But the truly motivated will find ways to call this "not evidence" as well. Only 100% incontrovertible proof counts as evidence for assertions they don't like. The bar is, of course, much lower for things they'd like to believe.
Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness [..] a positive white identity is an impossible goal. [..] strive to be less white.
I'm sure if this was any other race, you would likewise dismiss concerns as merely "hurt feelings". In fact, I encourage you to do so. Publicly and non-anonymously. Assuming you live in America, its pervasive white supremacy will support you, and you will suffer no adverse consequences.
But then we lost the plot somewhere along the way and got into forever wars and optional wars and wars that were seemingly based on interests other than those of Joe and Jill six pack.
The USG and the military see their recruits less as people resources that are used as a last resort and more as a tool to project some interest.
Unfortunately, people in government and in industry since the 90's, except for Ross Perot, ONLY saw $$ in their eyes. Of course, the seed was planted in '72 when Kissinger and Nixon tried wooing them as a counter-balance to Moscow as they experienced something of a falling-out.
But now, completely integrated into our economy as well as everyone else's it will be extremely hard to de-couple economies and they will kind of remain a necessary thorn and perhaps adversary.
Look, the Russia thing is pretty serious for the time being and all stops were pulled and still they are doing business with 2/3 of the rest of the world who could not care any less. Now, let's consider China and its larger clout and what effectives any measures against them would have.
And then we have the military who spent the Goodwill they had accumulated during WWII and the Cold war and squandered it with "nation building" and plain economic interest of industry. Fewer people will want to take up arms against an enemy given the last 30 years of continuous "elective" war.
But you’d never know that reading HN.
Once the crash happens plenty will sign up rather than face the dole.
Do you really want to join the military and help drone strike some innocent wedding in a far off country you can barely point to on a map?
> little oversight by the American public
I think people underestimate how popular ill-defined military action towards "terrorists" has been, and how roundly people would be criticized as unpatriotic for questioning it.
But there’s no shortage of engineers willing to work on weapons systems, or people willing to work for CIA.
I think it’s self centeredness.
> “They think they’re going to be physically or emotionally broken after serving,” said one senior U.S. military official familiar with the recruiting issues, who believes a lack of familiarity with military service contributes to that perception.
They’re not wrong.
I remember when Desert Shield was spinning up and pretty much all med-tech people who had taken the King's Shilling were being called up. They complained about possible career impact but they were reminded about contracts, etc. The world's a little unstable at the moment and that has to be off-putting. And the stories out of the Afghan and Middle-Eastern campaigns were probably off-putting as well.
Although military pay goes up every year, it has not kept up with inflation. The proposed pay raise for next year is 4.6% despite inflation being 8.6%. There are already a lot of military families that qualify for public assistance and one can expect this problem to only get worse.
If The Netherlands were to have dropped the definite article thirty years ago, I think English language cultures would still get caught up with "the".
Does it bother you that we say "Munich" and "Cologne" and that the French say "Londres" (I don't think these names have been politicized in English)?
But that's not what happened here and that's clear by the commenter returning to make a mockery of how to pronounce Kyiv. This isn't an accidental drop of the definite article: it's an intentional attempt to "dehumanize" (if there is a better word for what I'm attempting to convey here please chime in) by language. If you know the history of where "the Ukraine" comes from, you'd understand the use of the definite article here as a cudgel.
The better comparison for what the commenter is doing is the equivalence of dead naming transgender people but for states.
No one is antagonizing more than the commenter here.
>> But that's not what happened here
It is, isn't it? In 1991 it became Ukraine. I don't recall even being aware of the issue around the definite article until after the Russian invasion, sorry. But throughout my childhood when it was part of the USSR, it was "The Ukraine". These ingrained speech patterns are very hard to change on a dime, hence my comments about the slowness to change a language culture.
People get irritated with antagonistic correction, and you'll probably only succeed in cementing resistance to change that way, especially when no slight was originally intended. If you could read minds then maybe you're entitled to declare the poster's intent was to "dehumanize".
The first time I heard an English-speaker use a new pronunciation for Ukraine's capital, it was from a SW engineering manager that just returned from a visit there and had the whiff of some idiot returning from vacation in Mexico who henceforth insisted on saying "Mehico".
I'm using my own ignorance as an example of why you can't simply impute malice or an urge to "dehumanize". I'm also suggesting that your tactic is simply counterproductive.
I'll let you have the last word.
I personally see this entire debacle as some people watched V for Vendetta too many times and saw dollar signs. This routine was basically identical to the fictional 3-waters + viadoxin. [2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOxu09_JHpQ [video]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfm7y5nL30 [video]
That video is a master class of truth twisting and lying by omission. Yes, the testing was accelerated by many factors, including massive guaranteed funding, intense competition, huge trial participant interest, the prior 10 years of research related to mRNA antigen delivery, including developing a more efficient regulatory framework for such drugs, but not lack of thoroughness.
The Supreme Court is packed with Catholics. Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and even one coming in with a dissenting vote (Sonia Sotomayor).
Abortion is a wedge issue that drives Republicans to polls. It's as simple as that. The GOP is unconcerned about the consequences of this policy. It's only there to get GOP voters to the polls.
Roe V. Wade being overturned also has nothing to do with the viewpoints of any particular party or individual Supreme Court justice changing. The GOP has been anti-abortion for about as long as I can remember. The difference here is that the GOP got three Supreme Court picks in one 4-year presidential term, swinging the court rapidly toward the right. This is the GOP exercising its newfound power to achieve its long-stated, consistent goal.
There are much more effective ways to boost military enlistment than banning abortion and waiting 18 years.
The concept of “legislating from the bench” should terrify everyone in America as it is a sidestep of the checks and balances among the 3 branches of government.
It is the job of Congress to enshrine the right to an abortion into Federal law.
Roe v. Wade was the abstruse excuse to justify the desired outcome. It was effectively legislating from the bench.
> First, all the republicans claimed they would follow precedent unless there was a really good reason.
I think a prior court precedent being unconstitutional is a really good reason.
> They now claim the limits of our rights were set in 1868.
Where did get this idea? From the actual opinion of Dobbs:
> In arguing for a constitutional right to abortion that would override the people’s choices in the democratic process, the plaintiff Jackson Women’s Health Organization and its amici emphasize that the Constitution does not freeze the American people’s rights as of 1791 or 1868. I fully agree. To begin, I agree that constitutional rights ap- ply to situations that were unforeseen in 1791 or 1868— such as applying the First Amendment to the Internet or the Fourth Amendment to cars. Moreover, the Constitution authorizes the creation of new rights—state and federal, statutory and constitutional. But when it comes to creating new rights, the Constitution directs the people to the various processes of democratic self-government contemplated by the Constitution—state legislation, state constitutional amendments, federal legislation, and federal constitutional amendments.
What it says is that the Supreme Court is not authorized by the Constitution to grant new rights. This is 100% correct. Legislative processes are the means that should be employed to accomplish this.
It is Congress’s job to legislate, not the Supreme Court’s. Be upset at Congress for never codifying these protections into law even during several years where the Democrats held Congress and the Presidency giving them ample means to do so.