Realitybites said:
Meanwhile, in NATOs largest military...
"Diversity management calls..
The message is clear: if you are a straight white (or Asian) male and join up, you will be permitted to be shot for America when a feminazi or ****** orders you to the eastern front, but don't plan on things like leadership, promotion, or career development being part of your future.
Orwell would be proud.
I have no idea who Whiterock (the rest of the pro-war posters) think they are going to get to fight Russia for them….
Military recruitment is going no where and no one wants to die for DC regime change wars
[Military families have soured on the military.
The % of military family members who would recommend service to their children dropped from 55% in 2016 to 32% in 2023.
Relatedly the military fell 41,000 recruits short of its 2023 goal & it is now at its smallest size since 1940.
I've been talking about this lately, but this is the first time I can recall seeing hard numbers. That's a massive drop! I found this June 2023 Wall Street Journal article discussing the crisis in-depth; if you don't have a WSJ subscription, I found this website where the entire text can be read for free. Excerpts:
Today, nearly 80% of all new Army recruits have a family member who has served in uniform, according to the service. That can be a good thing, said Col. Mark Crow, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, because "people who know the most about it stick around."
Depending too much on military families could create a "warrior caste," Wormuth said. Her plans seek to draw in people who have no real connection to the military and to broaden the appeal of service.
First, 80 percent of new Army recruits have a family member who serves?! That's massive! And yet, Joe Biden's Army Secretary, Christine Wormuth, is worried about a "warrior caste" being formed. Look, I can see the reason for concern that the same families, and network of families, carry the burden of the nation's war-fighting, but there is something natural in this. And in any case, it's so damned typical of a managerial liberal that they won't be happy until they have forced human nature to conform to a scheme. Do we really have the luxury of fretting about warrior castes when we can't get enough people from any family to sign up?
It's not only about wokeness, but about how the civilian and military leadership of the US has used and abused the armed forces in this century:
Sky Nisperos, who moved around the world as a military brat, said that as a teen she began to see the effect of her father's nearly dozen deployments and tours away from his family. Ernest Nisperos said he remembers being asleep when one of his kids jabbed him in the ribs to wake him. He put Sky's sister in a wrestling ankle lock before he realized he was back home.
"My sister and I would say, 'It's just drill sergeant-dad mode,' especially for the month he came back," Sky said.
Ernest Nisperos realized his deployments, which involved battle planning and top secret intelligence, were taking a toll. In 2019, after he returned from Afghanistan, he took the family to Disneyland. During the nightly fireworks extravaganza, he cowered in the fetal position while his family and "Toy Story" characters looked on.
Sky worried her father would end up like her grandfather, the military patriarch, who in the years since he retired from the Navy started to have what the family describes as flashbacks to his time in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2005, sometimes yelling that he needed to take cover from a nonexistent attack.
Her father decided he didn't want that life for Sky and her two siblings.
… The sudden and unpopular conclusion to the war in Afghanistan in 2021 added to the disenchantment of some veterans, including Catalina Gasper, who served in the Navy. Gasper said she and her husband, who spent more than two decades in the Army, used to talk to their boys, now 7 and 10, about their future service, asking them if they wanted to be Navy SEALs.
In July 2019, on her last combat deployment to Afghanistan, she was stationed at a base in Kabul when the Taliban launched an attack. The blast battered Gasper's body and she was transported back to the U.S. for treatment and recovery.
She was left with lingering damage from a traumatic brain injury. She is sensitive to loud sounds and bright lights. She has recurrent dizziness and forgets words. She also has bad knees and herniated discs in her back.
The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, precipitating Kabul's fall to the Taliban. "We're left with the gut-wrenching feeling of, 'What was it all for?' " she said.
She said she was a patriot but decided she would do everything she could to make sure her kids never enter the military. "I just don't see how it's sustainable if the machine keeps chewing up and spitting out" our young people, she said.
The cost of the Globalist American Empire is paid in part by families like the Gaspers and the Nisperoses. Then many of them come home and find that they've been fighting for a system that despises people who believe in the things they believe in, and a government that expects them to kill and die for its supposed national security interests overseas, but won't even defend its own southern border.]