P. Michael Phillips Ph.D. – The Brownstone Institute July 30, 2022
The Pentagon, the central hub of US military operations. Click to enlarge
Replenishing the military ranks with qualified personnel is a perennial challenge. It’s no secret, though, that this year our armed forces are fighting uphill to recruit and retain talent.
Most of the services are well behind their quotas. But the Army, our largest service, is having the hardest time enticing young Americans. That service will fall short, nearly 20,000 troops from its original target end strength of 485,000 for FY ’22, and next year could be worse.
To manage, Army officials have slashed end strength and enlistment goals, while recruiters are offering fat stacks of cash and generous service terms as inducements.
So far, nothing is working.
The Army’s Chief of Staff, General James McConville, blames the shortfall on competition with the private sector. Others blame upwardly mobile families who would rather their children attend college than wear a uniform.
Both are old saws. And this year, they ring hollow.
Some civilian jobs do pay more. But for an 18-year-old with only a high school diploma, military compensation is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, recruits most often cite generous pay and benefits as the reason for signing papers.
Meanwhile, undergraduate enrollments are down over 600,000 from last year. So, it appears our missing recruits aren’t trading rifles for books, either.
Instead of blaming their competition, the Pentagon brass might dwell on their tarnished image as the reason fewer young Americans want to join up.
Public trust in the military institution has plunged steeply since 2018, according to one poll. Respondents cite politicized leaders, scandals, and the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan for their loss in confidence.
We might add to that list suicides, sexual assaults, social justice indoctrination, and Covid vaccination policies as dulling the shine of military service.
Of the lot, the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate may prove its deepest self-inflicted wound.
While the service chiefs are begging Congress to fund more generous recruiting incentives, they have forcibly discharged thousands of vaccine dissenters – including most of those objecting on religious grounds. A similar fate awaits tens of thousands more of the unjabbed in the National Guard and Reserve. Never mind that our military increasingly relies on these part-time troops for routine mission support.
And the Pentagon has doubled down. Submission to the vaccine is now a condition of enlistment, despite evidence the therapy is at best ineffective, and at worst dangerous for younger, healthier people.
It’s a policy gravely alienating to the families of Middle America whose children disproportionately serve in our all-volunteer force.
Before going further, consider that fewer than one quarter of Americans in the prime recruitment age of 17-24 years can meet our military’s physical, moral, or educational entry requirements, and that figure continues to decline.
Of those, only about 9% of young Americans have any desire to serve. Perhaps only 1% ever do.
High standards have produced something of an embarrassment of riches. Our service members are amongst the healthiest, most disciplined, and best educated of their cohort nationally. But to maintain this quality, recruiters have come to count on solidly middle-class families inhabiting our Mid-American towns, suburbs, and rural counties to fill their quotas.
Recruiters bank on small-town America because for a variety of reasons our populous cities produce few qualified volunteers. Even the New Yorkers and Californians in the ranks are more likely to hail from upstate or inland counties. In fact, a once-reliable third of all new recruits enter from just five southern states: Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
The prepossessed term for these rich recruiting grounds is ‘flyover country.’
Instead, we might think of them as communities celebrating life on a smaller and more intimate scale, and where patriotism, faith, family, and public service remain in fashion.
And yet their young people are not signing up like they used to.
The belief by some that vaccine mandates are meant to purge conservative Christians from the armed forces may be one reason recruiting offices are empty. After all, young people living in these prime recruitment areas are somewhat more religious and tend to be more conservative in outlook than many Americans.
They also are less likely to be vaccinated against Covid.
A more charitable account, though, is that the brass authored their own Catch-22 in the rush to prove their obedience to President Biden. As such, they have taken a position purported to improve readiness that has done quite the opposite. And now that they’ve become so thoroughly entrenched, they cannot easily retreat.
No matter. It should trouble the Pentagon more that their reluctant recruits are most likely military legacies.
Like many professions, the military is a family business. Roughly 80% of recruits either grew up in a military family or have a close relative who served. General McConville’s own clan is actually something of a poster family in career following, with three children and a son-in-law in uniform. Even the general’s wife once served.
Career following in military families is nothing new. It’s been going on since our country’s founding. The children of veterans, like those of bankers or physicians, often emulate their parents’ professional ethos early on. For soldiers, this includes a respect for duty and honorable, selfless service. The generational transmission of such virtues has played a critical role not only in reproducing our service cultures, but by extension our national values.
But it’s also a fragile chain.
While research indicates that military children are 5 times more likely to follow a parent into the service, only 1 in 4 do. And their desire to serve drops sharply every year over the age of 18.
In short, the Pentagon’s stubborn adherence to its Covid protocol is breaking faith with its once loyal base. And the longer they dig in, the smaller that base will become.
It’s a high price our nation may pay for unimaginative leadership.
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P. Michael Phillips is a retired senior military leader with significant political-military experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and a researcher in the social and cultural reproductive aspects of Civil-Military Relations.
Most people that join the army do so because they can’t see any other option open to them, and it’s always been this way. The idea that they’re being lured by better paid jobs as lawyers or whatever is obviously laughable (as most recruits are thick as s_it), and they can’t be lured by normal jobs because they all pay a pittance. They’re lured into the army by the money and the propaganda (“see the world, be a hero”). As usual, you can see the truth by looking at the facts — most army recruits leave after one set of seven or whatever years — because in reality being a soldier sucks.
I am a US military retiree (1965-1989). I would not join the US military today. Nor would I recommend
that a young person join the US military. The current sad and sick status of the US military began in the late 1980s. I saw this developing and retired in 1989. Today’s US military is just a collection of queers, trannies, perverts, lesbos and homos and women. Not many fighters left. The US Jews had better not start a war with Russia.
The clotshot that broke the camel’s back should NOT be understated here. It has become extremely OBVIOUS that this is the KILLER here, and it should be SHOUTED FROM THE ROOFTOPS!!! I know the extreme pressure put on existing troops, the mandate is unlawful, unconstitutional, and particularly UN-AMERICAN!!!! (fjb) DC is chock full of Assholic hypocritics killing this countries’ best for NOTHING, it would be madness to enlist and be WORSE THAN MURDERED for it!
Even now preparation for even more insanity is being hammered (monkeypox) into already feeble minds, and even tho it is a KNOWN fudgepacker thing, and there hasn’t been a single fatality, it is being presented as a pandemic and worldwide emergency, and stupidity is implying that ALL are at risk. We were warned to never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up, and yet here we all are.
If anything, the DELIBERATE state of FUBAR ( fucked up beyond all recognition) began with the mandating of the clotshot.
It is NOT too late, may all people see that.
I perceive that the pentagon is fabricating reasons as usual to discharge soldiers since the government does not have the money to fulfill its obligations to the military. The military routinely and systematically changes definitions and standards to justify picking and choosing soldiers to discharge. For example, military psychiatrists have received kickbacks for decades for labeling soldiers as personality disorders rather than ptsd because it saves the government money. PTSD receives honorable discharges with benefits while personality disorders receive dishonorable discharges with zero benefits even though PTSD and personality disorder have the EXACT same symptoms. The only difference is whether a psychiatrist will accept the bribe and agree to destroy the lives of soldiers by labeling them as personality disordered. The medical field is completely corrupt bc all of its members receive commissions on marketing its products in one way or another.
Whomever would be deranged enough to stroll into a recruiting office these days to serve under THIS criminal regime should be immediately forcibly guided to either a prison cell or a room with padded walls and a straight-jacket. Or perhaps even dropped through a trap-door immediately upon entry and plunged into a vat of acid.
Really, anyone so dangerously stupid or psychotic to enlist since September 2001, when the Jewnited Stated was attacked and thousands murdered by Israel and traitors within the DC cartel should have been guided straight on through the recruiting office, out the back door into the alley, and lined against a wall and shot.
Military service used to be a humble and serious thing. Shoot, my paternal grandfather flew a rickety shit-bucket biplane in WWI and nobody in the family even knew about it until 50 years later. Then the false-flag of 9/11 came along, loads of imbeciles fell under some ridiculous spell, military service was glorified as if you were saving heaven itself, then the imbeciles started parading around with all sorts of military adornment just so the other bleating plebs would take notice and “thank them for their service” What festering puke.
We now have idiots driving around with license plates on their vehicles proclaiming whatever wretched war crime they were a part of, like “Iraqi Freedom” or some other steaming satanic bullshit. What those particular dumb-f*cks don’t realize is they’re announcing they’re moronic psychopaths to anyone with more than two functioning neurons.
I hope/pray for many fighterjets
crashing down !
Better you boys stay at home + prepare
for the jew incited race war + defend
your girls !
PC = Political Communism
There is but one advantage to joining the army — you get a gun.
I guess there is only honour in serving your military while it is a defence force. Once it’s an offence force whether it calls itself that or not then it’s on its way down, because its moral right-to-be has been lost.
The only Army worth joining is the Army of Aiwass (A.A.)
With the adoption of ‘The Book of the Law’ as the new white religion & the creation of the A.A., I have established the foundation & vehicle for the future triumph of the Aryan race. The world is ours.
“I will give you a war-engine.” –The Book of the Law III:7
> The Army of Aiwass (A.A.)
Alcoholics Anonymous?
Automobile Association?
American Airlines?
Anti Aircraft?
I think they should have thought it over a bit more…
Was it the CIA who came up with the absurd “thankyou for your service”
Very few would sign on the dotted line to serve their country!!.
Usually the motivation is economic…..a way out of economic deprivation or to get a free university education.
No sensible person would sign up UNLESS America was being directly attacked….
So the expression SHOULD BE “thankyou for being a gullible twat”….
Take a leaf out of the billionaire playbook….none of THEIR offspring ever get killed on the frontline or even go anywhere near the armed forces…..and that includes the heroic Trumpsteen….a garralous windbag.
(Ps.”someone tried to set me up via a deception involving a chinese”….the question being WHO or more accurately ….who cares!!….I was onto this one immediately BUT it took several weeks for a “playback”.)
Ha Ha Ha Ha! I see old nics at it again ergo ” I know what’s best for you goyim lets do away with the jew god and, guess what,; yeh you’ve got it, lets bring in another jew god so you can kiss it’s arse just like the old one”. Yeh right there are still some of us who use our brains dickhead; Oh and while you’re here how tell me how is one (1) an army? …..
@grimsson…When did Horus become a ‘jew god’? Educate yourself, instead of looking like a fool on here..