Fair warning: If you are strongly invested in Societal Permissiveness and DEI as a part of National Defense, this post is probably not for you. Also, a couple of salty words may have accidently slipped in. My apologies for the second. Sometimes the sailor in me has no filter.

Final Warning. Some of the pictures are pretty graphic. If that concerns you, stop reading now. As for me, I’ve volunteered a number of times at the VA and am now using their services pretty much all the time. So, I’m used to seeing the results of their service firsthand. 

 

Want Volunteers? Keep Your Promises!

Headline after headline this past year about recruiting have all said the same thing. We are not filling the ranks of our military in numbers sufficient to meet the needs of the nation. Where are they? Why aren’t they volunteering to serve what is arguably the last bastion of freedom left in the world? Discounting the other nations that are typically seen as free nations, America has been one of the only nations that has held true to its founding principles.

Or has it? Let’s examine the problem first.

From an article in the On-line Council on Foreign Relations:

The Uncertain Future of the U.S. Military’s All-Volunteer Force

The United States military has a manpower problem and it’s not just due to today’s recruiting shortages. It’s time for a comprehensive plan to solve the personnel shortfalls.

“This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of United States’ all-volunteer military force. It also coincides with one of the worst recruiting years for the U.S. military since 1973. The army missed its 2022 recruiting goal by fifteen thousand soldiers, and the army, air force, and navy all expect to miss their goals in 2023. The shortage is blamed on a confluence of domestic issues: a competitive job market, lack of in-person recruiting during the pandemic, and a population of young adults who are less informed, less interested, and less qualified for military service. The lack of qualified recruits has received a lot of attention, but the fact that our young population does not see the value of military service should also ignite great concern.”

Blog Post by Erin M. Staine-Pyne

https://www.cfr.org/blog/uncertain-future-us-militarys-all-volunteer-force

(the blog post goes into a lot more detail)

The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. In May of 2022, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.

An internal Defense Department survey that was obtained by NBC News, it was found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007.

Three headed monster

The first part of the problem is clearly tied to societal norms that have gone very wrong in regard to the applicant pool. While statistics point to the top three (drugs, obesity and criminal charges), any physical and mental issues are clearly driven by the deterioration of our society.

Note: there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pictures depicting all three of these issues on the web. I intentionally did not include any in order to not invade anyone’s privacy. But I would challenge you as you are out and about or even on TV to look for examples. You won’t have far to seek them. 

Update: Saw this on Facebook today and thought, what the hell…

The fragility of the nuclear structure of families certainly plays into this problem. With divorce only being supplemented by the near crisis level of single parent households, children don’t stand much of a chance from day one. The permissive and dismissive attitudes of society have given birth to several generations of kids without traditional parental upbringing and guidance. It’s not a coincidence that out children and youth crime rates and lack of beds in treatment facilities is at the bursting point.

I worked in a local government that had more than its share of dealing with these troubled youth. From the gangs to the drugs to just mental health issues, our small area was deluged and often found itself lacking proper or adequate resources to deal with them. To be frank, we are a smaller county without the raging inner cities that you might expect to find this epidemic. Even in our most rural areas, fentanyl and every kind of drug can be easily found. The crime and medical issues are out of control. It only looks like it’s getting worse as more and more undocumented illegals start to migrate out of the border towns and big cities. You can see evidence of that invasion outside of most of our Walmart’s as the illegals line up to be picked up for their daily work. And this is rural Pennsylvania.

Without a family structure, you are also missing spiritual and faith-based experiences. Our churches are empty on Sunday morning. Even with some families, church is low on the priority list. The kids are off to sporting events and if there is a dad, he’s either off golfing or doing anything but being a dad. Gone are the days when Dad could be relied upon for structure and discipline. This is not the first generation, and it continues to decline. We can’t leave mom off the hook either. In between pursuing her own star or career, she has learned new ways to not raise her kids with any structure.

The second part of the equation is not really the kid’s fault but society as a whole.

Where we once had an assurance that our kids would be given a proper education centered around the basics (math, reading, science, history and physical education) we now have a public school system with too much focus on social justice, diversity, equity and inclusion. Many of the new generation of teachers have been raised in that system and propel the agenda with their own collective biases. Kids that should have time to discover the wonders of the world are too often indoctrinated with an anti-America bias that is littered with fractured views on sexuality and personal identification.

If you mention any of this in public, you face a fully rounded defense that includes all of the “isms” and “phobics” one might expect from activists trying to change the world view to meet their own views. Rainbows replace reality and made-up genders replace science.

I could go on for hours, but you get the point.

The trajectory we are on is a national defense issue. We can still build ships, planes, submarines, tanks and missile systems. But if we don’t find a way to salvage our pool of potential volunteers, we are in deep shit.

The enemies across the seas have no such problems.

While our kids are learning to accept tolerance, they are learning to calculate complex mathematical equations that will enable them to conquer and control an enemy. While our kids are focused on themselves, they are taught to work in coordinated teams with a laser like focus on destroying those who are in the path of their objectives. Some of our enemies are fanatical in their adherence to a radical philosophy which includes killing all non-believers. The stupidest thing I have seen in all of my 69 years is LGBTQI protestors marching to support Hamas and radical Islam. The fact that they lack the basic understanding of the core beliefs of the enemy is stunning and breathtaking.

What about the draft?

I was in the Navy when the draft was still in existence. My basic observation was that once the draft ended, many of the personnel problems went away. The all-volunteer force took away one of the strongest arguments of some of the worst performers. No one forced you to join and frankly shut your mouth and do your job. It was a simpler thing for leadership and produced a strong force. The only thing drafting would achieve is to put more people in the pool that would resent you from the day they were forced to join. That is assuming you could actually get them in shape to serve.

I talked about the two things that influence the pool now.

But there truly is one more.

Keep the faith with the people who do volunteer.

In the last few years, the leadership has failed to keep faith with the volunteers. During the pandemic, leadership was not very forthcoming about where the virus came from. Then, foolishly, they issued mandatory vaccines for active duty or dismissal. We betrayed them as we forced too many out. Now we are asking them to come back? Why should they ever trust leadership again?

Health care when they get wounded is also a thing. We had a twenty-year war. It was televised. The kids saw the Wounded Warriors coming home and struggle to get the help they deserved. It’s a hundred-year tradition for politicians to avert their eyes from the wounded. This generation knows nothing about the struggles of the returning World War 1 or 2 veterans to get proper care.

While many great strides have been made to help people of the following generations (including people like me who were exposed to toxic substances like Agent Orange) it’s probably easy for kids to see illegal invaders getting free health care and benefits without serving ONE DAMN DAY in uniform while vets go begging for the smallest of favors. Its hard enough to know you need help and even harder for veterans to ask. But every barrier in the world is put up to make them prove every single disease and illness. It can take years just to get a minimum rating. As somebody recently said “THAT AIN’T RIGHT!!!”.

They get daily reminders every day of the callousness of their government as they watch commercial after commercial by groups like Wounded Warrior, Tunnels to Towers and the DAV to provide the most basic needs of those who served in uniform and came home broken. I am grateful for each of those groups and others, but I have to be honest and tell you that the unspoken message to this generation is, I don’t want to have to rely on other people’s generosity if I get forced to go to a foreign land for ambiguous reasons made up by politicians and get my arms and legs blown off.

And truthfully, the continuing epidemic of homeless and suicidal veterans is not exactly the strongest message to a young person raised on a steady diet of unlimited consumption, unlimited access to technology, and forever being told that they are special and can be any damn thing they want.

Understand the cost of every decision

Finally, politicians, especially those that never served, need to make sure we never commit the lives or safety of our men and women unless they are willing to clearly articulate the need and have the backing of the American people. These are our sons and daughters, and they deserve the fidelity of leadership to make better choices.

SO, the answer to all of this is simple.

Address the root causes of the issues identified and rebuild the nation we once were. Or learn to be slaves to someone who does not fall prey to the societal ills that we are rushing to embrace. Centuries of history will agree that if you fall into the second category, the yearning for freedom will still be there. The thing lacking will be the means to achieve it.

Mister Mac