As someone who is currently on recruiting duty for a branch of the Armed Forces, I agree with the author. The sales pitch is increasingly based on tangible benefits. But even the money, bonuses, etc are not enough to entice a lot of young people.
The historical “bread and butter” of recruits (young, conservative, patriotic) has dried up b…
As someone who is currently on recruiting duty for a branch of the Armed Forces, I agree with the author. The sales pitch is increasingly based on tangible benefits. But even the money, bonuses, etc are not enough to entice a lot of young people.
The historical “bread and butter” of recruits (young, conservative, patriotic) has dried up because they increasingly see the military as a politicized institution that falls to the whims of the current party in power. The military is used as a political pawn, a place to institute policies and hold it up as an example to the rest of the nation that your politics work.
These people aren’t idiots, and they see the shameful things we did to those who refused the COVID vaccine. We were extremely aggressive and sought Other Than Honorable discharges in the beginning and gave them RE-4 enlistment codes (not eligible for reenlistment). We softened up a little bit later, but the damage had already been done. And when politicians finally forced the reversal of this policy, and allowed those forcibly separated to come back in, they didn’t offer anything other than the removal of negative paperwork. No back pay after being forcibly removed from your livelihood over something that we are now admitting never made sense in the first place. These people have families to feed and we showed a complete disregard for them.
We offered “religious exemptions” to those who did not want the vaccine on moral grounds, but the responses were rubber stamped “No” without any real consideration. It required a General Officer’s approval or disapproval, and in all of my experience, I’ve never seen a General Officer sign anything in less than 48 hours. But very automatically and swiftly the responses came back without any real consideration. Everyone knew it was just a convenient way to give the appearance of fairness, even though they had already concluded in their mind was the conclusion was going to be.
People see the lack of interest in having an honest debate about current or prospective service members with gender dysphoria and whether a condition that is highly correlative with other mental health conditions like anxiety, suicidality, and depression is truly suitable for military service in a war zone. It requires constant and routine medication in order to maintain. We take a hard stance on all other mental health conditions and any recent medication use for ADHD, depression, anxiety is immediately disqualifying. I sincerely want people with gender dysphoria to get better, but a lot of people can’t square a condition like that with military service and our leaders show zero interest in having that conversation without the Democrat/Republican hyperbole.
I also remember the SECDEF mandated “extremist training” that softly accused service members of being extremists and white supremacists after January 6th. The implication was that an extremist could be among us, lurking around any corner, and we had to report suspicious behavior.
I find myself often wondering if the military is still the place for me in today’s climate. I’ve dedicated the last 10 years of my life to it, but the military I joined is no longer the same. I just want to defend my country if called upon, but I’m not interested in being someone’s political prop or pawn in the culture war.
While I complied with it personally, I am split on the military COVID vaccine mandate. On the one hand, we take all sorts of shots including the anthrax vaccine which allegedly has a worse cost/benefit profile, and following legal orders isn't optional. On the other hand, most servicemembers aren't at great risk from COVID, and I wonder if much thought was given to the net effect on readiness that mandating the shot would have, i.e. how many people we'll lose to illness vs how many will be kicked out. I suspect the DoD may have had the same singular focus on getting shots into arms that led other parts of the government to do things like pretend natural immunity didn't exist.
One thing that struck me about the extremism training was that the central part was us reaffirming our oaths, and how that seemed oddly similar to what the Oath Keepers claimed was their ethos, basically 'we take our oaths seriously and won't do anything to break them.' Although I don't support them, and their actions on January 6th sure proved their critics right, I thought it was strange how what had been a mark of extremism was now part of an action against it.
Your fucking Commander in Chief is also a cretin... not to mention the assholes who rise to the top of the military. My son is trying to gain entry to the Service Academies. I continually try to warn him that soldiers are increasingly bound to the service of morons, neither worthy of respect, nor service.
The military is in competition with the rest of America's employers - thus the various sales pitches for the last fifty years. With all the back and forth in the comments here so far as I can tell, I haven't seen something mentioned that might be worth looking at - the reinstitution of the draft. And I say that as someone more liberal than most here. Of course it would be politically unpopular (probably poison..) but it would certainly enlarge the base the military needs in these uncertain times. Plus through the (arduous) screening process unsuitable draftees can be weeded out very early.
National service. Could be the unifier this country needs. Anyway, just putting it out there.
We don’t need a draft. If the country is attacked, people will step up to defend it. The problem is most of us don’t agree with having American troops on the ground in the Ukraine – – especially since Congress has not even declared war. This is unconstitutional. Which is why it’s not being covered in the MSM.
The Russian problem is terrible training and leadership. Not manpower. If Israel can do it so can we. If people are saying we have terrible soldiers now, how does a selective draft make it worse?
Thank you for your dedication. Young people aren’t interested in the bonuses because many young people don’t have to work to survive. The government has made it too easy to live without working and parents coddle their kids and take care of them way longer than necessary. Those who do love the country see what is happening to it. I ‘m way past the age of enlisting but I can tell you that with what this country has become, I am more likely to end up fighting my government than defending it.
I joined this in 2004 and after deploying got out in 2008. I was proud of my service and my country if not a little disillusioned with the motives. I would never join now. I don’t stand for what the government has become. I feel less patriotic than I ever have. I blame that largely on what you described and I’m not entirely convinced of the authors pointing to the new generation. This is rampant in all generations. All my friends who I served with would take no pride in their children serving todays military.
We are going to need more robots, more mercenaries and more non-citizens serving to try to earn citizenship. The Roman army also got to a point where they had to fill the ranks with non-Romans, and that was the beginning of the Fall. Not the only sign pointing to the doom of the United States, but it is high on the list.
Thank you for speaking up. Conservative patriotic folks, young and old, have been taken for granted for far too long. I think a factor you failed to mention among young, conservative, patriotic folks is things like the Afghanistan debaucle, the equivocal response to China, the all but abandonment of Israel while cozying up to Iran, and countless other foreign policy missteps. Not only have we devalued those bread and butter folks, we have devalued our ling-tome allies. To your gender dysphoria point, when I was in undergrad near a large Air Force base I had classes with many active duty airmen. They were of the breed you and Mr. Henderson say is now lost. In a discussion of women in combat I was parroting the talking points that women-could-do-anything-men-could-do so of course they should be in combat. One of those men said, very calmly, if he was in a foxhole with me his first priority would be my safety. That that was the way he was wired. I would never want to put someone in that position to satisfy my ego. It was a sobering moment for me and forever deterred me from looking at things from a warped, egocentric, point of view. Which I think is a good thing.
Thanks for writing your experience! In other USG jobs folks are having similar problems, including the forced shots problem. As for me, I am not all that concerned about small amounts of weight if everything else looks good, including mental health. Maybe correct weights should only be required for certain kinds of jobs? I live in a military community and there was much concern about the way the Afghan withdrawal was carried out.
The Long March took longer in our military, because few young Leftists were willing to subject themselves to military discipline and an atmosphere of patriotism for the sake of the cause. But it is now clear that enough of them were able to stick it out and reach positions of power.
Now that young conservatives have realized that the military--like every other institution in our society--has been taken over by the Left, they no longer want to join.
Thank you for sharing this real-world experience. I’m particularly struck by the section on why people with gender dysphoria might be unfit to serve in the military. Since everything in our world has been reduced to tweet-length sound bytes and instagram captions, complex issue analysis has been drowned out by the collective tedious puerile whine: “it’s NOT FAIR!” The fact is that not every little girl who loves to dance will be good enough to join a professional corps de ballet. Kids who are bad at math won’t grow up to actuaries. And how many eager freshmen wash out of the pre-med major after their first encounter with a rigorous hard science? Learning to accept this fact of life used to be called growing up, but in the madness that has overtaken our culture, we have handed the national keys to the five-year-olds who want to drive the family car. Maturity, complexity, and civility lie dead on the side of the road as a result.
Gender dysphoria was addressed by the policy that personnel remain the sex that was listed at the time of induction for as long as one served. This was a neat and tight solution until Trump tweeted (2017) that no transgenders were allowed in the military and suddenly a rational solution was challenged. The current policy is not to discriminate against anyone transgender.
It's because when in theater one might not have access to medications that have to be taken regularly. It's the logistics, not the person. I'm a retired veteran so I'm not up on all current personnel policy and don't know if this is exactly true, but I've been told that the military now routinely offers Lasik surgery to all personnel. Thus no worries about poor eyesight or broken glasses in theater. Same idea.
If someone isn't medically qualified to be "in theater" someone else has to take their place. And yet everyone is supposed to be all part of the same team, except when the going gets tough they get to bail? How do you get any espirt de corps??
That was an excellent and nuanced comment... Why do you think the military was prone to falling into the trap of the progressive ideology instead of standing up for its more conservative values? I would have thought that if there was one institution which could resist it would be the military, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
The military follows orders. Things would change with a president who wanted a rough and ready, hard-charging force. But with the changes in public attitudes, that would be a small force.
Traditional values were deemphasized in the Obana Administration and collaborators like Milley et al. were promoted to general/flag officer rank, while officers committed to the military's traditional values of service and sacrifice were passed over for promotion and voluntarily or involuntarily retired. Most 3-stars and 4-stars serving today received their first star from Obana and are collaborators with the woke agenda. Trump was only able to appoint a small number of generak/flag officers, and most of their careers have been intentionally dead-ended. It will take at least 8 years of a pro-Anerican Administration to solve that problem. We haven't had such a situation since the Reagan Administration. Bush 41 and Bush 43 weee wirthless ciphers and the Deep State got rid of Trump as expeditiously as ut could
I remember during the Obama administration the Pentagon sent a team of investigators looking for "extremists" who were supposedly a threat to minorities in the ranks. At every base, they were told there were no problems with white nationalists, but there had been some conflicts in the barracks between Black service members affiiated with rival gangs. That wasn't what they wanted to hear, the investigators went home and their report was never heard about again.
He talked a good game when he was first running. But I couldn't vote for him for in 2008 one very specific reason: he rose through the Chicago Machine. An inexperienced young man, "selected" by the bosses of the most corrupt political cabal in the country? No, I couldn't do it.
Maybe because the top brass and those who aspire to that position are skilled only at ass kissing and personal aggrandizement and don't care a bit about patriotism, unit effectiveness and the United States of America?
I don't know about you, but the fact that the article is a thinly veiled attempt to discredit Teixeira really got under my skin.These people are supposed to be journalists, not those tasked with covering the perfidy of the US government.
So if someone discloses that the U.S. government is lying to citizens, that person should go to jail? I'm so old I remember when the NYT printed the Pentagon Papers and loved leakers. Of course that was before a Democrat's ox was gored, then it was circle the wagons post haste.
Someone who photographs protected documents and shares them with his friends in exchange for street cred is not a whistleblower. Comparing him to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg is wishful thinking at best. And I don't even like Ellsberg.
No... you are confused. The method of distributing the message was via leaking secret documents. He could have shouted from the rooftops "They are Lying!" and he would be completely within his rights. Ellsberg was charged. I hope they charge this clown also.
I think that was the obligatory hat tip to left leaning readership. You know, you should read this to understand the evil Texeira even though my assessment is that Texeira likely views himself as old school military.
As someone who is currently on recruiting duty for a branch of the Armed Forces, I agree with the author. The sales pitch is increasingly based on tangible benefits. But even the money, bonuses, etc are not enough to entice a lot of young people.
The historical “bread and butter” of recruits (young, conservative, patriotic) has dried up because they increasingly see the military as a politicized institution that falls to the whims of the current party in power. The military is used as a political pawn, a place to institute policies and hold it up as an example to the rest of the nation that your politics work.
These people aren’t idiots, and they see the shameful things we did to those who refused the COVID vaccine. We were extremely aggressive and sought Other Than Honorable discharges in the beginning and gave them RE-4 enlistment codes (not eligible for reenlistment). We softened up a little bit later, but the damage had already been done. And when politicians finally forced the reversal of this policy, and allowed those forcibly separated to come back in, they didn’t offer anything other than the removal of negative paperwork. No back pay after being forcibly removed from your livelihood over something that we are now admitting never made sense in the first place. These people have families to feed and we showed a complete disregard for them.
We offered “religious exemptions” to those who did not want the vaccine on moral grounds, but the responses were rubber stamped “No” without any real consideration. It required a General Officer’s approval or disapproval, and in all of my experience, I’ve never seen a General Officer sign anything in less than 48 hours. But very automatically and swiftly the responses came back without any real consideration. Everyone knew it was just a convenient way to give the appearance of fairness, even though they had already concluded in their mind was the conclusion was going to be.
People see the lack of interest in having an honest debate about current or prospective service members with gender dysphoria and whether a condition that is highly correlative with other mental health conditions like anxiety, suicidality, and depression is truly suitable for military service in a war zone. It requires constant and routine medication in order to maintain. We take a hard stance on all other mental health conditions and any recent medication use for ADHD, depression, anxiety is immediately disqualifying. I sincerely want people with gender dysphoria to get better, but a lot of people can’t square a condition like that with military service and our leaders show zero interest in having that conversation without the Democrat/Republican hyperbole.
I also remember the SECDEF mandated “extremist training” that softly accused service members of being extremists and white supremacists after January 6th. The implication was that an extremist could be among us, lurking around any corner, and we had to report suspicious behavior.
I find myself often wondering if the military is still the place for me in today’s climate. I’ve dedicated the last 10 years of my life to it, but the military I joined is no longer the same. I just want to defend my country if called upon, but I’m not interested in being someone’s political prop or pawn in the culture war.
While I complied with it personally, I am split on the military COVID vaccine mandate. On the one hand, we take all sorts of shots including the anthrax vaccine which allegedly has a worse cost/benefit profile, and following legal orders isn't optional. On the other hand, most servicemembers aren't at great risk from COVID, and I wonder if much thought was given to the net effect on readiness that mandating the shot would have, i.e. how many people we'll lose to illness vs how many will be kicked out. I suspect the DoD may have had the same singular focus on getting shots into arms that led other parts of the government to do things like pretend natural immunity didn't exist.
One thing that struck me about the extremism training was that the central part was us reaffirming our oaths, and how that seemed oddly similar to what the Oath Keepers claimed was their ethos, basically 'we take our oaths seriously and won't do anything to break them.' Although I don't support them, and their actions on January 6th sure proved their critics right, I thought it was strange how what had been a mark of extremism was now part of an action against it.
Your fucking Commander in Chief is also a cretin... not to mention the assholes who rise to the top of the military. My son is trying to gain entry to the Service Academies. I continually try to warn him that soldiers are increasingly bound to the service of morons, neither worthy of respect, nor service.
Your perspective is interesting, KB. Thank you.
The military is in competition with the rest of America's employers - thus the various sales pitches for the last fifty years. With all the back and forth in the comments here so far as I can tell, I haven't seen something mentioned that might be worth looking at - the reinstitution of the draft. And I say that as someone more liberal than most here. Of course it would be politically unpopular (probably poison..) but it would certainly enlarge the base the military needs in these uncertain times. Plus through the (arduous) screening process unsuitable draftees can be weeded out very early.
National service. Could be the unifier this country needs. Anyway, just putting it out there.
We don’t need a draft. If the country is attacked, people will step up to defend it. The problem is most of us don’t agree with having American troops on the ground in the Ukraine – – especially since Congress has not even declared war. This is unconstitutional. Which is why it’s not being covered in the MSM.
The draft is a terrible idea. People who aren’t intrinsically motivated to be in the military make terrible soldiers. Just look at the Russians.
A draft would further erode the quality of the military.
The Russian problem is terrible training and leadership. Not manpower. If Israel can do it so can we. If people are saying we have terrible soldiers now, how does a selective draft make it worse?
Thank you for your dedication. Young people aren’t interested in the bonuses because many young people don’t have to work to survive. The government has made it too easy to live without working and parents coddle their kids and take care of them way longer than necessary. Those who do love the country see what is happening to it. I ‘m way past the age of enlisting but I can tell you that with what this country has become, I am more likely to end up fighting my government than defending it.
KB, thank-you for your service. Your comment is excellent and thought provoking.
I joined this in 2004 and after deploying got out in 2008. I was proud of my service and my country if not a little disillusioned with the motives. I would never join now. I don’t stand for what the government has become. I feel less patriotic than I ever have. I blame that largely on what you described and I’m not entirely convinced of the authors pointing to the new generation. This is rampant in all generations. All my friends who I served with would take no pride in their children serving todays military.
Thank you for your service.
We are going to need more robots, more mercenaries and more non-citizens serving to try to earn citizenship. The Roman army also got to a point where they had to fill the ranks with non-Romans, and that was the beginning of the Fall. Not the only sign pointing to the doom of the United States, but it is high on the list.
Thank you for speaking up. Conservative patriotic folks, young and old, have been taken for granted for far too long. I think a factor you failed to mention among young, conservative, patriotic folks is things like the Afghanistan debaucle, the equivocal response to China, the all but abandonment of Israel while cozying up to Iran, and countless other foreign policy missteps. Not only have we devalued those bread and butter folks, we have devalued our ling-tome allies. To your gender dysphoria point, when I was in undergrad near a large Air Force base I had classes with many active duty airmen. They were of the breed you and Mr. Henderson say is now lost. In a discussion of women in combat I was parroting the talking points that women-could-do-anything-men-could-do so of course they should be in combat. One of those men said, very calmly, if he was in a foxhole with me his first priority would be my safety. That that was the way he was wired. I would never want to put someone in that position to satisfy my ego. It was a sobering moment for me and forever deterred me from looking at things from a warped, egocentric, point of view. Which I think is a good thing.
Seriously, we didn’t want women in the field because they have periods, but now people who need constant medication are ok?!?
Interesting. Sometimes we just miss the practicalities of being at war on the ground. Thanks for the comment.
Thanks for writing your experience! In other USG jobs folks are having similar problems, including the forced shots problem. As for me, I am not all that concerned about small amounts of weight if everything else looks good, including mental health. Maybe correct weights should only be required for certain kinds of jobs? I live in a military community and there was much concern about the way the Afghan withdrawal was carried out.
The Long March took longer in our military, because few young Leftists were willing to subject themselves to military discipline and an atmosphere of patriotism for the sake of the cause. But it is now clear that enough of them were able to stick it out and reach positions of power.
Now that young conservatives have realized that the military--like every other institution in our society--has been taken over by the Left, they no longer want to join.
Thank you for sharing this real-world experience. I’m particularly struck by the section on why people with gender dysphoria might be unfit to serve in the military. Since everything in our world has been reduced to tweet-length sound bytes and instagram captions, complex issue analysis has been drowned out by the collective tedious puerile whine: “it’s NOT FAIR!” The fact is that not every little girl who loves to dance will be good enough to join a professional corps de ballet. Kids who are bad at math won’t grow up to actuaries. And how many eager freshmen wash out of the pre-med major after their first encounter with a rigorous hard science? Learning to accept this fact of life used to be called growing up, but in the madness that has overtaken our culture, we have handed the national keys to the five-year-olds who want to drive the family car. Maturity, complexity, and civility lie dead on the side of the road as a result.
Gender dysphoria was addressed by the policy that personnel remain the sex that was listed at the time of induction for as long as one served. This was a neat and tight solution until Trump tweeted (2017) that no transgenders were allowed in the military and suddenly a rational solution was challenged. The current policy is not to discriminate against anyone transgender.
It's because when in theater one might not have access to medications that have to be taken regularly. It's the logistics, not the person. I'm a retired veteran so I'm not up on all current personnel policy and don't know if this is exactly true, but I've been told that the military now routinely offers Lasik surgery to all personnel. Thus no worries about poor eyesight or broken glasses in theater. Same idea.
You should see the mess “surprise” pregnancy causes.
If someone isn't medically qualified to be "in theater" someone else has to take their place. And yet everyone is supposed to be all part of the same team, except when the going gets tough they get to bail? How do you get any espirt de corps??
That was an excellent and nuanced comment... Why do you think the military was prone to falling into the trap of the progressive ideology instead of standing up for its more conservative values? I would have thought that if there was one institution which could resist it would be the military, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way.
The military follows orders. Things would change with a president who wanted a rough and ready, hard-charging force. But with the changes in public attitudes, that would be a small force.
Like every other institution, it experienced the Long March. It took longer to show up, because the U.S. military is a tough haul for young Leftists.
Traditional values were deemphasized in the Obana Administration and collaborators like Milley et al. were promoted to general/flag officer rank, while officers committed to the military's traditional values of service and sacrifice were passed over for promotion and voluntarily or involuntarily retired. Most 3-stars and 4-stars serving today received their first star from Obana and are collaborators with the woke agenda. Trump was only able to appoint a small number of generak/flag officers, and most of their careers have been intentionally dead-ended. It will take at least 8 years of a pro-Anerican Administration to solve that problem. We haven't had such a situation since the Reagan Administration. Bush 41 and Bush 43 weee wirthless ciphers and the Deep State got rid of Trump as expeditiously as ut could
I remember during the Obama administration the Pentagon sent a team of investigators looking for "extremists" who were supposedly a threat to minorities in the ranks. At every base, they were told there were no problems with white nationalists, but there had been some conflicts in the barracks between Black service members affiiated with rival gangs. That wasn't what they wanted to hear, the investigators went home and their report was never heard about again.
Bush 43 and the Patriot Act were like steroids for the deep state.
Yikes! I was not aware of the role Obama played in this.
Amazingly effective destructive President. First President that was anti-American.
He talked a good game when he was first running. But I couldn't vote for him for in 2008 one very specific reason: he rose through the Chicago Machine. An inexperienced young man, "selected" by the bosses of the most corrupt political cabal in the country? No, I couldn't do it.
Maybe because the top brass and those who aspire to that position are skilled only at ass kissing and personal aggrandizement and don't care a bit about patriotism, unit effectiveness and the United States of America?
you are on a roll today.
Don't know why this essay set me off but it did. Maybe up before six and too much caffeine?
I don't know about you, but the fact that the article is a thinly veiled attempt to discredit Teixeira really got under my skin.These people are supposed to be journalists, not those tasked with covering the perfidy of the US government.
Discredit!?!? If the guy is convicted I will be happy to see him do 20 years. Or send him to the cold parts of Russia to live with Snowden.
You can't complain we have no unity and then hold up as example a guy who sells out his country.
So if someone discloses that the U.S. government is lying to citizens, that person should go to jail? I'm so old I remember when the NYT printed the Pentagon Papers and loved leakers. Of course that was before a Democrat's ox was gored, then it was circle the wagons post haste.
Someone who photographs protected documents and shares them with his friends in exchange for street cred is not a whistleblower. Comparing him to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg is wishful thinking at best. And I don't even like Ellsberg.
So - to you - if the messenger is discredited, so is the message?
No... you are confused. The method of distributing the message was via leaking secret documents. He could have shouted from the rooftops "They are Lying!" and he would be completely within his rights. Ellsberg was charged. I hope they charge this clown also.
I think that was the obligatory hat tip to left leaning readership. You know, you should read this to understand the evil Texeira even though my assessment is that Texeira likely views himself as old school military.