The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Children to Join
wsj.com
wsj.com
The military is a fucked up place with utter bullshit like the CO using a suicide victim's "voice" to say we should work harder, where failures of people stay in (too afraid of civilian life, or trapped in the military since they're the only one who covers their child insurance wise, or worse get their rocks off at the command climate), and along with the entire thing being utterly corrupt (there are no economic pressures to do better, no social pressures since everyone is trapped by that contract, and no oversight pressures since politicians are afraid of the fallout of being hard on the military).
(On the bright side with the failure of the military to recruit, we know things are NOT completely hopeless economically/emotionally/socially for gen Z. Since when things get that bad, they're likely to ignore the advice of people who have recently been in)
https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...
I don't know why that would be the bright side, but I draw the opposite conclusion. As you say, you joined because it was an escape hatch (from a worse option, I assume) and declining recruitment suggests that gen Z has better alternatives.
I joined explicitly to play GI Joe for a couple years and explicitly chose a job that had me frequently out of sight of my chain of command.
And I knew from family members the tradeoffs involved with making it a career.
The military always had s** jobs, but if you played your cards right you could avoid them mostly. Sounds like it's harder to avoid the crap these days.
Should mention I was in from 85-90 w/ a couple years of reserves. Ymmv.
Nukes are a good example of how the military simply does not care, is not allowed to care. The Congress will not resource problem sets. But they will increase requirements against those problems. And the military can only use coercive tactics against the individuals in the jobs. So the job is getting harder, the commanders getting meaner, and all the while your pay is inflating away as you watch (dod) civilians play on greener grass.
No joke, a certain combatant command will pay civilians >200% of an servicemember's total military compensation for the exact same workrole. When SMs bring it up, like with the posted job offer as they ETS, the command accuses them of being mercenaries who chase money and don't believe in America or the mission. It's the same mission for the same employer.
By the way, TFA mentioned the Marines as the only branch still meeting quotas, so maybe things are not so bad there.
Young Southern White men make up the bread and butter of the military. They have been the target of recruiting campaigns for decades upon decades. This group has collectively checked out of a society that has nothing but contempt for them. When the highest levels of the government and half of the political establishment have nothing good to say about you, opine about how "toxic" your existence is, and openly laugh at your struggles... who would want to put their life on the line for that? When patriotism, their basic existence, etc. are derided as "fascist", then why even give a shit? When you're suffering from record levels of depression, dying from suicide and drug overdoses at rates never seen, still being openly discriminated against and laughed at, supporting the system that not only allows, but encourages that behavior is ridiculous.
Effectively, the US Military is experiencing a variation of "go woke, go broke". Guess they couldn't find enough Emmas with two moms to fill their ranks. I guarantee we'll see the US government start to peel back DIE initiatives to fill their ranks back up.
Here's the simple reality: the US military is useless to join for young men because they cannot guarantee you a home anymore. You are exchanging your life possibly just to come back with slightly more money. This means even poor young men aren't considering it anymore.
Which were their actual base, poor men who were desperate and had no other option. Exploitation.
Men killing themselves isn't about "open discrimination". If such were true, other groups would have had far greater levels of suicide historically. They're killing themselves because they cannot make a living anymore, and this is due to the perpetuated belief that money is central to your worthiness. Something plenty of groups have been trying to fight against, what do we call those again? Com something...
We can distract ourselves all we want, that it's not how much we've fucked the economy, but rather some randoms online calling people toxic that are the real problem.
It's nice to talk about those groups in the abstract, but when you look at them more specifically... well, let's ignore their historical record, and focus on the ones in the US. Their central tenet seems to be that white men (and women, when they dare object) are the source of all evil in the US, are solely and inherently racist, and must repent and atone for their current and historical sins for the foreseeable future.
Give up your borders, your identity, your remaining political power, and maybe, if you grovel hard enough, the new benevolent authorities will throw you a few scraps, after they're done redressing your historic wrongs.
You can maybe see why that's not a tempting offer. Learning from history, Ukraine once "accepted" such an offer - gave up their national identity and political power, to join the Soviet Union and its utopian classless society. They were repaid with Russification and the Holodomor. I'm sure they had people admonishing fellow Ukrainians for "acting against their self-interest" by clinging to their nationality then, too.
That's what happens when you don't step out of leftist bubbles.
>Here's the simple reality: the US military is useless to join for young men because they cannot guarantee you a home anymore.
That's been true for a long time, even before this precipitous drop in recruitment.
>Which were their actual base, poor men who were desperate and had no other option. Exploitation.
That is false. It's a narrative parroted often by leftists, but it's not reality. The poor are underrepresented in the US military.
>Men killing themselves isn't about "open discrimination".
No one said that. Go back and read my comment.
While it feels to me like US military service may exist for the purpose of "defending freedom", it's mostly utilized for defending and promoting the interests of the wealthy. As others have mentioned, this has been the case for a long time, but there is a far broader understanding of this now than in decades past.
Who wants to sign up to put their life, or the life of a loved one at risk for the purpose of making someone else wealthier? It's completely absurd.
Join the military, become a US citizen - https://apnews.com/article/army-air-force-recruiting-shortfa...
And the police: Bill to allow noncitizens to become Illinois police officers heads to governor’s desk - https://www.mystateline.com/news/local-news/bill-to-allow-no...
In addition to helping hit military recruitment targets, they also have less attachment to the American people, so they're less likely to revolt if they were deployed domestically.
The only way I can make sense of your attitude is if you believe wanting to get US citizenship, and being willing to join a military (from their point of view a foreign military) is a sign of virtue, and only good people would do it.
So, why would I discourage my kids from joining a great organization? How many people in the Navy have died in combat after WW2?
The thing is, if you don't want to risk your life, but you still want to join the US military, there are plenty of positions in the military where you don't risk your life.
> regime that hates them and everything they stand for?
Well, that's you opinion. You are entitled for it. "Entitled" meaning here, there is a certain piece of paper that guarantees your right to have and express your opinion. Piece of paper that would be worth less than a piece of toilet paper, if not for the US military.
After WWII, only a tiny minority of wars fought by the US were in self-defense. Most of the time the military was on foreign soil of countries that never attacked the US. The most their justifications amounted to were terrorist attacks, to which it responded with full invasions that left millions dead.
It took half a century, but people are just not buying "we have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here" anymore.
If you used the same threshold for what justifies an invasion against the US, as the US does to other countries.. well, you wouldn't mind Chinese drones and bombers flying overhead, liberating you, would you? It's either that, or their constitution becomes worthless.
It's surrounded on two sides by ocean, and its neighbors are very friendly.
The secesion war was fought by actors. /s
Instead they allowed them to settle as a group, maintain their own leadership and armies and just function basically as ‘vassals’ states of Rome and we know how that ended…