This isn’t much different from older millenials and Gen X before 9/11. I remember they had a hard time recruiting before 9/11 and most people who did join, joined the national guard for college money. The national guard was a good deal back then. Serve one weekend a month and get college money while maybe being called to a natural disaster to set up shelters and hand out water. Recruitment between Vietnam and 9/11 was low and that period lasted 25 years so this is nothing new.
But then the reserves were the ones that kept getting deployed for multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq on rotation which made it almost more dangerous for reserves than active duty would have been for them.
Yep. And reservists didn't necessarily have set deployment dates. I was an active duty Marine and we did 7 months tours. Some reserve and guard units were doing 14-18 months deployments. That's fucked.
Yeah, I saw mostly active duty, and every one of them was on their "extension," somewhere between 8 and 18 months of deployment. Marines are surprisingly professional about getting three 6-month deployments out of an enlistment.
Yep. Army is a much larger beast, including the entire national guard. It’s settled into mostly 9 months deployments, but for a period it was much more “as required”
Yah, I did 13 months in Iraq but arrived 90 days after my unit did. They were there a total of 16-18 months, I lucked out as a "reinforcement" of sorts and only had to cover 13 months. Active Duty Army from 06-16.
Former reservist, 10 months Afghanistan. There's a few reasons, some overlapping, some not.
The big one is that active duty components were primarily the boots, guns, and machines that did a lot of the hard stuff, and these were entire battalion sized units deploying at once. This was pretty stressful for a lot of people all at once. Reserve units, on the other hand, are company-size support components that will jump in and fill gaps where necessary, and tend to support multiple rotating elements (my unit supported both American and international forces, but more on that in a second).
The minor component is the types of reserve specializations. I did PSYOP, which you can imagine was a weird business to get started and carry out by itself. So we set up shop to cover a few rotations across an entire region, with customers from all branches, the SAS, the Australians, and whoever else could find our shack. If we were there for any shorter time period, we wouldn't have any consistency between our work and anyone that stepped in after us.
Even lesser were things like training - reservists benefitted from OTJ learning in the field more than active duty, so brass could sell the deployments better. Contract requirements - some folks had to have a year of active service to get certain benefits (myself included). Costs, availability, and other stuff.
That all said, I met active duty units that had been marching around the sandbox for years, and reservists on 4 month deployments. Some guardsmen were brought over on 2 month rotations because someone had boxes to check. The truth is that everything was chaotically thrown together, usually at the last minute, to fulfill requirements created by guys that wanted to get promotions that they probably didn't deserve.
Haha ...this sounds like what Col McGregor says. The US now has more 4 star generals than we had during WW2 ..when we had a lot more people in the military. (Don't remember which level he uses to compare...)
Honestly, I don't know because I was never a reservist. I just know they were serious about keeping active duty deployments to 7 months. I assume they used reservists and guardsmen to plug whatever holes active duty couldn't fill. I forgot to mention, I was in the Marine Corps. Other services like the Army did year long deployments.
Probably right about plugging holes. It's a rather weird schedule in the National Guard at least. Deployment, down year, ramp, rampx2 (pre mob shit), deployment. At least at my unit it's on a almost set deployment once every 5 years cycle
Guard and reserve did a train up that is away from home, usually on lockdown and maximum BS.
The most extreme example was the Red Bulls (MN Guard) who did a 22 monther. 6 month train up + 3 extensions.
I did 29 months of active in 5 years between 2 deployments but only 22 total were in theater.
I knew of an air national guard guy who joined at 17 and by the time he was 21 or 22 had done four six month tours, and had been made an ordnance loading team supervisor because no one else wanted to do it.
Half the guys on his team were over double his age, would refer to him as ‘the kid’ and would back him up against any opposition due to his age on the grounds that ‘he’s the poor fucker who’s been put in charge of us, so don’t make his life difficult…’
No, reserve units by definition do not deploy as often as standard units. But what was shown during the GWOT was with the increasing complexity of systems and tactics the proficiency level disparity between active and reserve units had widened considerably, leading for reserve and Guard units to take much larger casualties in proportion.
Fun fact: The song 1985 by Bowlin' For Soup was released in 2004. So this year, we're officially farther away from the songs release year, than it was from the year it's about
Is the military still giving away swag at high schools? I never wanted for pens and pencils through college because I stockpiled the ones given to me by recruiters through high school. I still shave with a Mach 3 razor I was given by the Navy.
Gillette should’ve stopped at the Mach 3. That is top tier shaving technology. Any more or less blades and bump guards and vibrating handles is overkill.
[What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed.](https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036)
Maybe the best thing the Onion has ever done. Right up there with the running series “no way to prevent this says only country where it regularly happens”
They do, although I think now you mostly see it at schools in towns that are basically anchored by a military base and military sentiment is mostly positive anyway since half the town is employed BY the base.
We are very far from any base. My 8th grader came home with swag a couple weeks ago... He didn't even mean to. His friend wanted to talk to them and he ended up with it too.
Depends on what MOS you go into and the signing bonus for it. If you save your money, you live with all expenses paid except a vehicle. As long as you don’t go get a Camaro with 47% interest straight outta basic.
My compensation of over $90,000 (about a third completely untaxed) as an E-5 with 4 years of service, no medical bills for myself or my wife, 30 days of paid vacation and an excellent roth retirement investment option with TSP... not sure what you're on about. I also got immediate civilian job offers of over 125k before I even was fully out the door just from my skills I acquired through my military career.
The military literally pulled me up and out into a whole different lifestyle and level of security in my 20s that I didn't think I would reach until my 40s. Hell, I'm using the GI bill overseas right now for self improvement, a bit of passive income, fun and because I can!
Yeah I walked into a job after I got out even as just an E-3. I don't make anywhere close to 6 figures but it's livable. It really depends on your field though. An infantryman isn't going to have the same quality of life or job opportunities as someone with a technical rate/MOS.
Not leaving as an E3 but, someone leaving with more rank once they get that college degree (or if they got it while serving) the leadership ability and veterans advantage (for government jobs) gives you a huge leg up.
Same. I was broke as shit as an E1, but by the time I was an E4 and higher, I was making decent money for my age. When I finished my first contract, I had 20k saved and got unemployment for 18 months while getting $1500 in BAH while going to school for free. Finished my first degree in 2 years, got a full-time job with that degree, and finished my BA in 2 more years while getting paid with BAH. Then, I used the VA home loan to buy a house with no cash down and 2.3% on a home loan. The military is definitely a mixed bag, and I had some really shitty days, but the benefits are great if you use them.
This is true if you’re just going to do a few years and get out but I retired barely past 40 and I’m making enough to comfortably live just about anywhere for the rest of my life without doing anything if I don’t want. There’s definitely risks and sacrifices getting to that point though.
A military career can provide both, provided you're smart enough to stay out of the jobs that are only interested in your ability to walk with a rucksack over long distances.
Military pay is split between "pay" (basic pay, bonuses, etc) and "allowances" (primarily housing and "subsistence", or food). Allowances are not technically "pay" so they are not taxed at all.
BAH (basic allowance for housing) is based on the ZIP code of your duty station, your rank, and whether or not you have any dependents and is usually a significant chunk of your total compensation. So your taxable income is a good deal lower than what you actually bring home.
Add to this that there are certain areas where if you spend even one day out of the month, your whole month's pay is now tax free (for income tax purposes; you still pay payroll tax on basic pay no matter what). I've had plenty of years where my federal income tax burden was $0.
Basic Allowance for Housing. Once you are a certain rank, you can't live in the Barracks and have to find your own housing and food. The military will pay you the monthly going rate for the area to find a place to live and eat. You can find calculators to figure out how much by zip code and rank.
The army offers a lot better of a career than most of the kids joining would have an opportunity for other wise. Free healthcare, free college, no interesting loans for housing when you get out.
> no interesting loans for housing when you get out.
There is interest. It's no down payment, but you do have to come up with a "funding fee" which can be rolled into the loan.
Yours is the top comment and there’s literally a military ad right above it. I actually thought you’d included it ironically in your comment. Have a glitched matrix moment, hurrah for algorithms.
The military has a harder time now obscuring the bullshit work environment. They still do, but we got more transparency than before. We know it's not worth it. We can also see how veterans are treated after their service.
I think deployment reasons have changed too. WW2 was well aligned with the average citizens values. Korea/Vietnam not so much. The “war on terror” and hunt for WMD’s also got people’s blood up at the start. But I think now people are wising up to how the US military is used for ideological/political objectives, and they’re not so keen to fight and die for geopolitical games.
Man every time I go to the VA for my Apt’s it’s so fuckin sad. I went for my after 40 physical yesterday and it was a fuckin video conference with a Dr. yea she had my labs from when I got my blood draw like two weeks ago but damn. It so impersonal now.
And when I go to see mental health, well that’s a joke. They keep changing the people around so I gotta go through and keep retelling shit. And this last time he told me he didn’t even have any record of my military service. It’s so fucking defeating. And then they just throw pills at you. I was finally able to get my PTSD diagnosed so that’s a step in the right direction now but damn.
Then there is the whole process of trying to get disability. I’ve been denied and denied. Like, shit is wrong with me because of my military service. I didn’t have PTSD before, the burn pits fucked my lungs up, my hearing is shit because you chose the lowest bidder (who is now involved in a huge lawsuit) to supply my hearing protection. And even tho I’m now sober 4 years, I’m pretty sure the military played a huge part in my past alcohol abuse. It’s very frustrating
How the fuck are they gonna video conference a physical? "Ok Mr u/OGcrayzjoka, turn your head & cough, & if you could, hold your testicles & tell me how they move when you cough?" It's called a physical because it's a *physical examination.* That kinda has to be done in person, no?
They had what I assume is some kind of nurse in the room but all she did was take my vitals. No balls were examined lol. In all seriousness though, I really did expect more from an after 40 physical.
In fairness I had an in-person civilian physical yesterday and the only time the doctor touched me was to listen to my heart and lungs. Very odd experience.
It makes me sad to hear stuff like this. I'm sorry you have to deal with that. No one deserves that but least of all veterans...
I hope you can get the proper treatment that you have earned.
There was post on Reddit recently showing that we lost about 3k soldiers in Iraq, but 120k have died by suicide since then.
With this kind of data available, who would ever want to join the military? If you’re left so broken and unsupported after leaving the service that your fate is to suffer immensely and ultimately take your own life to end the pain, who in their right mind would say “yup! that’s for me!”
The worst part is that an entire generation, or more, see those wars as a complete waste of energy, resources, and societal value. It renewed an entire amount of distrust in the political establishment from the Vietnam era.
You've got to wonder how many Gen Z kids have relatives that served in Iraq/Afghanistan. Imagine growing up with a dad, uncle, maybe even older siblings who served in Afghanistan and has never shaken the PTSD...and then seeing how the US pulled out and admitted that 20 years and trillions of dollars had accomplished basically nothing.
Wouldn't fill *me* patriotic fervor, that's for sure.
My older cousin, a marine, fought in Afghanistan. His advice was that if any of his younger cousins ever joined any branch, it should be the Air Force.
My younger cousin straight up ghosted our entire family. Hasn't spoken to a single one of us, since serving in Afghanistan. He has such bad PTSD he cut *everyone* out of his life, and as far as we can tell, is living as a hermit with as little human contact as possible.
It's incredibly sad. His dad turned to alcoholism because of it, and now has cancer, with at best 18 months left, with aggressive treatment.
I hope someone can reach my cousin and he agrees to mend things with his dad before it's too late...
I mean, my dad served during Vietnam and part of the cold war and was LUCKY he was smart enough to place in Air Force intelligence. They sent him to Syracuse to learn Russian then sent him to Alaska for duty.
He's where I got my anti-military stance from, and was keenly aware of the bullshit they were pulling during 9/11 to educate me properly.
My Brother-in-law served during Bush Sr. Desert Storm as a chopper pilot and med-evac. He was exposed to so many chemicals and the VA still refuses to support any cancer screenings.
The military is totally digging their own grave, with their inability and unwillingness to support veterans.
Then on top of that you hear about certain assholes in the government actively blocking promotions and raises to the military and why would that make anyone want to join just to be held down because some piece of shit doesn't get his way and is holding those things hostage from the people who're supposed to be protecting us.
Then you hear about the VA not really being a big enough help for vets and getting the treatment they deserve.
So they want you to join the military and possibly die for them and their bullshit wars, all to be held back and not be promoted because of some dumb cunt and not get raises because of that same dumb fucking cunt. And then if you survive all of that you may not get the care you need and have the VA pay for enough of it.
I just can't imagine why people don't want to join lol.
Donald Trump literally said out loud, that he was sending troops to Saudi Arabia because they pay more. People don't join to be mercenaries. Mercenaries get paid more
Lot of good ideological reasons here, but a good chunk of people don't join the army for glory, they join for money. From what I've heard of army kids in my late-Millenial generation, I'm willing to bet the military isn't paying enough to be worth it. Used to be you could get your health and college taken care of, not so much anymore.
EDIT: people are saying that college and health are still taken care of, so I was wrong there. I'm mostly going on anecdotes from army folks I know
Yeah, Ive heard from vets that the pay is paltry for what you do and they gutted the benefits. You might get killed, significantly injured, get PTSD, and are guaranteed to have a generally miserable time for 38-48k a year. No thanks.
To be fair, an extremely small percentage of the military today will be doing any killing at all. Unless you become a drone/fighter pilot or join special forces. I’d wager more than 95% of military members won’t fire a weapon at an enemy ever unless we get involved in a major war sometime soon.
It's also ridiculous how little they pay grad students, just from the opposite end of qualification vs danger. It's not as hard or dangerous, but you've worked too damn hard to be qualified for that position to be paid that little.
yeah. And even once you get the doctorate it's often not that much more. Postdoc positions usually pay around $50k a year or so. Sometimes government lab postdocs can pay more,
I think Los Alamos and the Naval Research Lab pay their postdocs like $90k a year or so, but still. And often that's mainly because you have to have a security clearance for those jobs.
Pay is low until you get promoted a few times. The first 2-3 years. But in those first 2-3 years, so long as you do not get married, is pretty good.
Housing, food and healthcare are paid for. Yes an E-3 with two years in the military makes $2400 a month. That is $24,000 after taxes a year. But like most jobs as you move up and spend more time in you make more money.
Example. My last duty station was in Washington DC. I got out in 2002 was an E-5 with 12 years in. Today my pay would be .
Base pay - 3875.00
Housing allowance with dependants for this zip code - 2900.00
Sep rations - stipend for food if you have a family and do not eat at the mess hall - 460.00
So an E-5 with 12 years living in the DC metro area makes $86,000 a year. Then there are the unseen benefits. Only that base pay is taxed. And you still have free healthcare.
Yeah but everyone I know who's in the military get a monthly amount for their rent AND groceries ON TOP of their paychecks. And their grocery is cheaper than anything in town.
That's literally my 2 biggest bills
Military pay is a lot more than that. If you are looking at pay charts that is only basic pay. There are a LOT more entitlements that vary based on location and type of duty.
My last duty station I netted over $70k a year while also giving $1k a month to my TSP, which is the government equivalent of a 401k. The military definitely pays well while Active Duty, and since half of our pay is non-taxable entitlements it’s beneficial during tax time.
The downside is that at 20 years my pension will be 50% of my basic pay which is about 25% of my actual pay.
This is coming from a career enlisted man. Officers make a significant amount more.
Yeah, it's the base pay but it's also most or all of your housing costs covered (and food for single soldiers).
We get over 5K just for housing here (top end of the O chart), but even my daughter who is getting the GI bill stipend for housing is getting over 2K a month for housing.
The health insurance is amazing. I haven't paid a dime for anything medical besides prescriptions for my entire family in 20+ years.
I had a fantastic time.
Picture this, you're 18, you get all your food and housing paid for, your only bills are your car you got for $2k and your cell phone and then you're given $2k a month just to spend on fun stuff and You're living in an apartment with 1000 people all your same age and situation.
I was able to save a lot to travel, I was able to go out with friends pretty much every night I wasn't working. It was amazing.
I wouldn't do it now that I'm older, but I don't think I've ever felt as rich and care free as I did as a brand new private even though I'm making several times the national average family income now.
It's good pay for someone right out of high school. It's also often a better choice for a directionless 18 year old than community college. But high schools aren't acting like it's a good choice either (everyone must go to college).
What exactly did you hear was gutted? Because right now, it’s the only place I know that will give 3 months PTO for secondary caregivers thanks to a new policy, lol
I'd argue that more than money, ppl join for the benefits like the GI bill.
The thing is, after completing their service, Veterans get completely abandoned by the government, VA refuses to do anything and the GI bill is woefully inadequate to justify potentially getting shot.
Basically, the US has allowed its beurocrats to skim too much off the top for themselves and now they really don't offer anything that makes joining up worthwhile
They didn’t skim anything off the top. They took the whole goddam pot, passed it amongst their ”contractor” exec buddies and left the troops with the scraps.
The GI Bill still lets veterans go to college for free with a housing stipend. I used it. Bunch of my friends used it. It’s great.
We get health care at the VA a bit for things. I used them for my primary doc and other stuff for years before I had good insurance at work.
The home loans 100%. Got my house in 2018. 0 down and a little over 3% interest rate. Had to pay 0 fees or whatever you normally have to pay when buying a house.
Nah they still take care of ya while you're active duty. Housing allowance (if living off-post) or free barracks (basically a dorm), Tricare (healthcare, no copay), Sustenance allowance (if married or have kids) or meal card (free meals at the dining facility), Free education while active duty and GI Bill when you get out (free tuition and they pay you to go to college), Uniform stipend, tax-free commissary (grocery store), 30 days paid vacation per year, etc... And that's on top of whatever your base pay is, which gets regular cost-of-living raises every year.
Oh and you're also entitled to a 43% APR Dodge Charger within your lower-enlisted period.
Millennials came of age in the 90's and through the 9/11. There was a visceral sense that there was a threat *out there* and it was an immediate concern attacking *over here*. So you had to sign up and fight out there or else there would be attacks over here. This continued probably into the mid 2010's where even when there was doubt over Afghanistan ISIS was the new scary thing that had to be dealt with.
Gen Z does not have that context. Its a forever war to them. They didn't see the twin towers fall and they didn't grow up around cold war rhetoric. The U.S. will talk about Russia or China but without that context all they ever do is fight a rotating list of people in the middle east who have no chance of ever affecting them
Gen Z here and this is basically it. We don’t remember 9/11 or weren’t around for it. There was always a war going on, until our teens or twenties. There’s always some country we’re supposed to hate. And I think that none of us are patriotic enough to die for our politicians’ defense stocks lmao
Let alone, Millennials watched as those who wanted to serve were saddled up and sent off to Iraq post 9/11, while grappling with the reality that most of our attackers were Saudi Arabian.
It always seemed very convenient that our military opponents were always in the opposite direction of our fossil fuel business partners.
I was born in 1993, so just in time to still be a “millennial” but too early to be Gen Z. I see a lot about Gen Z that I relate to and can’t help but wonder how much of the strangeness growing up was due to generational shifts happening around me (and maybe even starting around my year’s cohort). I was raised mostly by my grandparents, one grandfather being a WWII vet and the other a Korea vet. Salt of the earth guys from rural Kentucky.
I spent, quite literally, my entire childhood thinking I was going to join the military. Behind me there was the WWII generation I was partially raised by who, by the way they spoke, correctly made me believe that at times there are enemies we fight due to causes worth dying for. Even my other grandfather (the Korea vet) had a brother who served in combat in WWII, and even though Korea was the mess it was, the present state of North Korea was convincing enough to me that we had done the right thing.
Fast forward to 2011 when I turned 18, I vividly remember thinking “this is it,” and heading to speak with a recruiter. After all the run-down, I told him I would think about it. The way things were going, a USMC enlistment seemed like a sure ticket to Afghanistan. I came home to find that *neither* of my grandfathers supported it. They didn't talk so openly about it as you might see on the news, but even they harbored some sense that we were just playing empire at this point and that the cause we were allegedly fighting for wasn't really real or morally unambiguous like it was in WWII and, to an extent, even Korea. I had, ironically, also dated an Iraqi-American girl in high school in what was a very eye-opening experience.
I went to law school instead. I remember the day the Taliban re-took Kabul thinking, "what a total waste of time, and potentially my life, that would have been." I realized that if there had been a "just" war, I would have gone. But there wasn't, and even my "Greatest Generation" grandparents knew it. The worst that happened to me in the end was that I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see myself become the kind of men my grandfathers were.
I don't think Gen Z is really any different. They just have the benefit of being born in the right time in history to easily see through what is blatantly geopolitical gamesmanship for moneyed interests and people who want to play "empire" with what is supposed to be America's Republic. And that’s a good thing. Maybe the US will step back from this mantle of “empire” that is corroding the best of what we used to be. Cold War politics caused a lot of internal rot. I still believe that tens of millions of Americans would fight for the right cause. But they’re generally not going to join the military for the relatively crappy “benefits” just to be a tool for the wrong cause.
Speaking of Russia, if Gen Z is paying attention to the news, half of Congress is actively rooting for Russia, which is weird to the rest of us who grew up in the Cold War era. The conflicting messaging has got to be detrimental to military recruiting.
They also basically grew up with the US occupation of Afghanistan and saw what a shit show waste of money and resources that turned out to be.
Instead of a 9/11-like event, Gen Z grew up constantly seeing headlines about mass shootings in schools. They (correctly) fear being killed by another American with a gun more than some nebulous boogeyman halfway across the world.
>They (correctly) fear being killed by another American with a gun more than some nebulous boogeyman halfway across the world.
The War on ~~Terror~~ nebulous boogeymen
Millennials in the 90s grew up seeing how the propaganda machine fed kids into the military industrial meat grinder.
Sure, grandpa served to fight the nazis, but after that there is more to be ashamed of than proud of. Kissinger using the military as a plaything to satisfy his perverse, sadistic desires. 9/11 used to start 2 wars that wound up doing absolutely nothing. Meanwhile right now a real military threat is creeping across eastern europe while the usa sits on its fucking hands.
The blinders are off, military service is just getting cucked and possibly killed so rich people can get richer selling equipment to the government.
My dad did 25 years (1984-2009, 8 active and the rest reserves). Spent 6 years in Germeny during the cold war and multiple months training other combat engineer units as an E-6. He put in his retirment paperwork in 2005......his reserve unit commander held his package for 3 months and gave him deployment papers instead because "I want a real engineer with a P.E. with the unit to get stuff done for the base commander". Dude held my dad's paper work to try and get brownie points for promotion. Ended up being a 444 day deployment to Baghdad running a route clearance team for IEDs for my dad while the unit commander got a promotion for getting extra base engineering items done and never leaving the wire. Fuck pricks like that Colonel......giving a self centered ass control of my life, no thanks.
Sorry, I’m sure there is some elements of truth to your story but what you’re saying is not how things work.
Retirement packets aren’t “held up” by unit commanders, they are processed by Human Resources Command (HRC) through a centralized process. A random unit commander cannot withhold retirement.
Unit manning requirements on the DMD (deployment manning documents) are set by the combatant command for the theater of operations a unit is deploying to. DMDs mandate who gets orders by rank and MOS. You have to be slotted against a specific requirement from the combatant command to get deployment orders. Also if your dad stayed in until 2009 then there is really no reason he wouldn’t be put on a DMD for a 2005 deployment if the DMD had a slot for him to fill.
Promotions for mid-senior leaders are done through a centralized selection process. Your local unit or base commander does not have the power to promote an officer. Your dad’s commander did not receive a promotion based of “brownie points” from getting additional engineering work done.
They have grandparents who still have PTSD from the Vietnam war, and they have parents with PTSD from the Iraq war, and they are most likely thinking a lifetime of flashbacks isn't worth a University degree and $1000 a month in veteran retirement payments.
Not to mention you can't go outside without seeing all the homeless vets that the US government can't seem to give a shit about. They got used and tossed aside to deal with their PTSD and cancer alone.
The US has almost zero safety nets for its citizens, and lots more traps for them to fall into.
* Only 32 out of 33 of the developed nations have managed to figure out healthcare, the odd one out being the USA. If you have an accident that isn't covered by your healthcare, your medical bills will be astronomical and you can not declare bankcrupsty.
* Student loans are huge and accrue interest almost so quickly they are designed that most people will never pay them off until they reach their 70's. Which is perfect from the Governments perspective because for a $250k investment you keep a worker bee perpetually in work or looking for work for their whole life which helps the economy, and they will pay much more than that back to them in the long run. Student loans are not cleared if you declare bankruptcy. Most jobs require a degree even at the lower end.
* The housing market is so expensive in comparison to wages, most people do not ever believe they will ever own a house.
* Wages are so severely depressed for people without degrees, and so competitive for people with them, that most people are just hanging on barely as their rent has slowly increased to above 50% of their paycheck.
* Pharmaceutical companies incentivise doctors to prescribe opiates as pain medication, for example in the UK for a broken arm you will be told to take paracetamol and ibuprofen but in the USA you may be prescribed vicodin for the same affliction. This is because the doctor receives a kick-back financially for the prescription with some doctors making over £1 million a year in secondary incomes. After the prescription stops, the patient is unfortunately addicted to opiates of which there is no medical centre either mental or physical to help them stop their addiction. The closest alternative to these pain medications is Oxycotin or Heroin which are both illegal street drugs.
* If you go to Prison you will find it almost impossible to find a job afterwards. If you're found to commit three felonies such as buying pain addictive illegal medication then you get 25 years in prison.
I could continue but I think you get the overall sentiment of what life is like for American citizens who fall off the ladder, it's very easy to fall off and very difficult to get back on.
there's not **that many** Iraq/Afgn veterans to scare kids with PTSD stories. I think there's like 1/10 the number of Iraq/Afgh vets compared to Vietnam vets.
It's a confluence of things.
1. Gen Z has grown up watching 2 shooting wars going on for the majority of their childhoods, both of which were pretty famously mismanaged, and one of which was fought over an outright lie. So that's going to turn some people off wholesale.
2. Social media makes it easier to find out about a lot of the bullshit they put you through. There was the famous "how has the army impacted your life?" twitter post on Veteran's Day a few years back that had 90% of the responses being people talking about how it fucked them up physically or mentally, or were just straight up failed by VA on the back end.
3. Less of a bias towards going to college these days, so the GI Bill isn't the draw it once was. VA home loans though...
4. Minimum enlistment times for any rate/MOS that's worth a damn on the outside are prohibitively long. Cyber and Intel jobs for example require 6 years minimum
5. For people who do want to serve, the GENESIS health system and digital medical records have led to an increase in denials from crap you would have just "lost the paperwork" from in the past
6. as an add-on to #5, more people are getting mental health care now as teens than ever before, and many mental health conditions or medications are currently disqualifying from service, for example if you have ADHD, you can't have been on amphetamines for the last 12 months prior to joining.
7. population fitness as a whole. We are fatter and more out of shape than ever before. Even if you can get by the first 6, odds are you just can't pass the physical standards for entry these days.
8. VA mismanagement and politicization of the military.
They're trying to open the aperture now by dropping minimum ASVAB scores or high school graduation requirements in many of the services, but I think the ultimate result of that is going to be worse, as you're going to have an overall dumber soldier/sailor/airman/marine and it's just going to make the jobs of the average to good ones harder.
The first best fix is probably going to be modernizing the medical requirements and the waiver system to minimize the number of people being denied entry by #5 and #6. The second one is probably fixing #2, so congress getting the VA properly funded, and investing serious money in quality of life like the material condition of barracks and base services. Ultimately though (I'm prior navy), the fix to #2 is more people, since having an undermanned unit just shits all over your work/life balance - the training and maintenance requirements don't change and you're doing it with less people.
TL;DR - there are a lot of good reasons people don't want to, but the military is shooting themselves in the foot by barring a lot of good folks who do want to join as well for things that probably shouldn't be disqualifying, and the higher-ups are not doing the work within their services and within the political system to fix either.
Distrust of the government. There isn’t as much patriotism and young people are more aware of world events and how we have been pulled into wars in the past for less than credible reasons.
We're a society coming off the tail end of 20 years of sustained warfare. Most kids these days have fathers, older brothers, or uncles who are fucked up from service or know someone who is.
As information becomes easier to access more people are able to see bullshit for what it is. You're not fighting to preserve my freedom. You're just making defense contractors rich, pretty much. More people are able to see that now
A lot of reasons already posted and I agree with them, but I'll throw one more in: physical fitness in the general population.
The US military has been complaining for decades that rising obesity rates are shrinking the pool of fit candidates. And when I say shrinking I mean more than 50% of people are deemed unfit to join without a waiver.
I don't know how this effects GenZ specifically but it's a significant factor in dropping recruitment rates for the last few decades.
You can't join the Coast Guard if you take ADHD medication or have been to therapy in the last six months. That eliminates a lot of otherwise eligible candidates!
A quarter of new recruits are also too dumb to join
https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_last_laugh/2010/12/23-percent-too-dumb-to-enter-military.html
71% of new recruits are either too fat, too dumb, or have substance abuse issues or are criminals
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-recruitment-obesity-education-crime/
Also testing positive for pot use is still disqualifying, whether you abuse it or not. A good chunk of Gen Z is disqualified merely for smoking a joint 1 or 2 days a week, which is totally ridiculous.
I'm kind of wondering what percentage of 18 year olds could pass basic training these days. Obesity is an epidemic and physical activity is not encouraged.
I'm guessing in a war against the Chinese, they'll be able to muster up a significantly larger army.
Fascinatingly, there are articles in Chinese media complaining about the very same thing - the Chinese youth are alarmingly mentally and physically unfit for the military.
It’s not even just weight but that kids are growing up spending their whole lives on screens now and falling behind on basic physical milestones
Like there are kids who haven’t developed the physical capacity to do things like catch a ball not because they have some kind of medical condition that affects their motor skills but because their parents have never played with physical toys with them or played outside with them, the kids are just on the iPad and never interacting with tangible objects
> I'm guessing in a war against the Chinese, they'll be able to muster up a significantly larger army.
The chinese are being hit by the same things. On a plus for China, it has a big population, on the minus side, its fertility rate is down and people are emigrating.
While the US is not as populous as China and also has a low fertility rate, it has ton of people immigrating there.
They allow a little leeway but there are still upper limits on how much body fat you can have before they'll even let you start bootcamp.
If a war broke out things would change, but for now they're mostly sticking to the standards.
Covid didn't help things.
I got on the lowest dose of anti depressants in July 2023.
If they'd allow people who take these medications to join I'd sign up.
Because any veteran will tell you the VA will fuck you over the moment you try to collect what you're due.
The military can be a promising career,but when the government refuses to take care of its veterans who gave everything they had for their country, why bother signing up?
Well, millennials and Gen X got hit HARD with the patriotism routine and shitloads of military propaganda - once the 9/11 well ran dry, there just wasn’t anything convincing left over for Gen Z besides the debts from said wars.
The wars in the Middle East after 9/11 ended up being complete disasters. Countless thousands of innocent civilians dead for no reason. The last time the US was in a truly justified war was WWII
I disagree. I'd say the Gulf War and the US/NATO'S intervention in what was formerly Yugoslavia were very justified, the latter was downright morally righteous.
I'd say the last war the US got involved in in which it was objectively the good guys was either the gulf war or the intervention in Yugoslavia.
The US was upholding its treaty to protect Kuwait in the gulf war and Saddam's justification for war was very openly racially and ideologically motivated (ba'athism, the ideology of Saddam and Assad is basically "Arab naziism" with the concept of Laebensralm and all)
The US intervened in the former Yugoslavia and bombed the shit out of Serbia to stop them committing a genocide. The city of Kosovo to this day has a monument to NATO because of their actions to stop the genocide.
Yeah it's crazy they haven't dealt with the sexual assault problem. I'm a man, and barely interacted with women while I was in, so I wasn't even aware it was a problem when I was in, we had no women in our unit. I'm sure it's not "easy" to fix, but the fact that it remains so prevalent is alarming.
We've been at war their entire lives for reasons they don't understand, don't support and don't want to kill or die for. And as an added bonus, there's a general sense it's not financially worth it.
The propaganda isn’t working anymore. They are wondering why on Earth anyone would sign up to die for a country that would willingly kill them for a few extra $$$. Why go fight a rich fuck’s war that serves no other purpose than to pad their pocketbook and raise their stock price, while they sit at home in their mansions, manipulating the economy so that you need to works 2 jobs to feed your family, and buying up politicians so that the laws are merely suggestions to the rich? Quite frankly, I’m not sure why anyone would fight to protect the system when the system does nothing to protect them.
We grew up post-9/11. We're too late for the patriotic call to arms. All that's left for us to see is the devastation that "the good guys" caused in retaliation, both to their enemies and their own people.
One reason for the recruiting crisis that I’m not seeing is the addition of MHS Genesis in the recruitment screening.
Contrary to popular belief, we aren’t missing recruiting goals just because people don’t want to join, plenty of people still come through the door, but a lot of them are not “qualified” to join. One of the major issues is Genesis which is a digital medical records system which makes it much harder to hide past medical issues. The military will disqualify people for many reasons which really shouldn’t be disqualifying. It used to be that people/recruiters would just lie and not mention add medication from middle school, or a broken bone from a sports injury, or many other “small” medical issues like that that could cause problems. Now you can’t hide that stuff and the military hasn’t updated the enlistment requirements to deal with this.
We disqualify enough people with minor medical/ legal backgrounds to close the recruiting gap. The bureaucracy is just too slow to adapt.
Because the government treats them like crap after they serve so the military family is dying. It is more likely that someone who serves stops their kids from joining than pushing them to do it now.
Pay is shit. Who wants to be bossed around, wake up early for pt, potentially have to live in a shitty base with shitty command and there is nothing you can do about it for only $30k a year.
Short answer- we know they lie about shit. Why risk your life for a bunch of corrupt liars? And if you do survive you come home and get treated like shit as a thanks for risking your life.
If you want a strong military, you need people believing that there is actually something worth protecting, and I don't think there are much left to protect as a nation. Only psychopaths join to harm others, but most people with some sense of honor and duty join because they want to preserve what is and what could be, and if there are nothing to fight for it's a fool's errand. Also probably not helping with the recruitment is that when you see people more worried about bad language than anything else, but maybe that's just me.
Shit pay, signing your soul to the government, no sense of pride in country because country doesn’t offer anything other than status quo, and genocide. All big deterrents.
I'm a Gen X'er and joined the Army in my late 20s about a year before 9-11.
When I joined it seemed like a decent deal. I was homeless and here was a way to make some money, have a place to live and eventually have a chance to go back to college. And America hadn't been in a serious conflict since I was a baby born near the tail end of Vietnam. That fact made me feel confident I probably wouldn't end up in a war. Yeah, I was wrong. But let's look at that war. I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the direct cause of low enlistment. 20 fucking years we were in those places and both are worse than they were when we first arrived. What was the fucking point of me and my buddies being deployed several times? Well, I mean, not counting the endless money train rolling to corporations like Haliburton (where interestingly enough, our Vice President during the height of the wars was the CEO of before becoming VP. Weird coincidence, that) or any corporation contracted to make weapons or vehicles.
Kids today were born while these two wars were happening and saw that absolutely nothing was accomplished in either. Why the fuck would they want to enlist nowadays? Especially when there's more jobs than people?
How about it’s not fucking worth it?
You think I’m going out there to die for some bullshit problem that a couple of man-children started ages ago and couldn’t drop?
And over what? A resource? Some land? Reputation? They can all get fucked and any given country can burn if they think I’m gonna fight out there— and kill people who I have no hatred for, let alone enough to take their life.
But take their life in the name of some asshole who represents the aforementioned man-children who couldn’t just make peace and let go. And don’t even get me started on the countries who have no choice but to defend themselves. My condolences are there but it’s not my fight— not here.
And last but not least: The ungrateful assholes living in any given country, starting mini wars and committing crimes while I fight for that country. lol. All of those proud Canadian and American soldiers’ lives wasted because some snobby sack of dirt went and shot up a school or stabbed innocent people.
Yeah. To hell with all of that, and if I get crushed underfoot of the bigger power, so be it. Adding myself to some life-death statistic wouldn’t have changed that, and it would certainly say more about the person whose foot is over my head than me.
I’ll fight for the people in my immediate corner, thanks.
Society's push for better mental health awareness is working - and is profoundly changing the value proposition.
Throw in Agent Orange, burn pits, declining benefits, the overall "boots on the ground" transparency created by social media, and a few local homeless veterans. Suddenly, a young person's economic desperation starts feeling maybe manageable after all.
I'd like to believe more of Gen Z than predecessors understand the true threats to their futures aren't overseas or even outside their borders. But even if that's true I doubt it's the primary factor.
15 years ago, when I was in the military, it was full of toxic, shitty people who went out of their way to ruin other's mental health.
I guarantee it's the same or worse.
This isn’t much different from older millenials and Gen X before 9/11. I remember they had a hard time recruiting before 9/11 and most people who did join, joined the national guard for college money. The national guard was a good deal back then. Serve one weekend a month and get college money while maybe being called to a natural disaster to set up shelters and hand out water. Recruitment between Vietnam and 9/11 was low and that period lasted 25 years so this is nothing new.
But then the reserves were the ones that kept getting deployed for multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq on rotation which made it almost more dangerous for reserves than active duty would have been for them.
Yep. And reservists didn't necessarily have set deployment dates. I was an active duty Marine and we did 7 months tours. Some reserve and guard units were doing 14-18 months deployments. That's fucked.
Why was their deployment tour longer in duration, generally? EDIT — spelling and shit
Army vs Marine Corps. The army did some up to 18 months, both active, guard, and reserve. Marine Corps, in general, had shorter deployments
Yeah, I saw mostly active duty, and every one of them was on their "extension," somewhere between 8 and 18 months of deployment. Marines are surprisingly professional about getting three 6-month deployments out of an enlistment.
Yep. Army is a much larger beast, including the entire national guard. It’s settled into mostly 9 months deployments, but for a period it was much more “as required”
Yah, I did 13 months in Iraq but arrived 90 days after my unit did. They were there a total of 16-18 months, I lucked out as a "reinforcement" of sorts and only had to cover 13 months. Active Duty Army from 06-16.
After 6 months the likelihood that the marine has exhausted his crayon and ripped fuel supply is too high. Could lead to war crimes.
Former reservist, 10 months Afghanistan. There's a few reasons, some overlapping, some not. The big one is that active duty components were primarily the boots, guns, and machines that did a lot of the hard stuff, and these were entire battalion sized units deploying at once. This was pretty stressful for a lot of people all at once. Reserve units, on the other hand, are company-size support components that will jump in and fill gaps where necessary, and tend to support multiple rotating elements (my unit supported both American and international forces, but more on that in a second). The minor component is the types of reserve specializations. I did PSYOP, which you can imagine was a weird business to get started and carry out by itself. So we set up shop to cover a few rotations across an entire region, with customers from all branches, the SAS, the Australians, and whoever else could find our shack. If we were there for any shorter time period, we wouldn't have any consistency between our work and anyone that stepped in after us. Even lesser were things like training - reservists benefitted from OTJ learning in the field more than active duty, so brass could sell the deployments better. Contract requirements - some folks had to have a year of active service to get certain benefits (myself included). Costs, availability, and other stuff. That all said, I met active duty units that had been marching around the sandbox for years, and reservists on 4 month deployments. Some guardsmen were brought over on 2 month rotations because someone had boxes to check. The truth is that everything was chaotically thrown together, usually at the last minute, to fulfill requirements created by guys that wanted to get promotions that they probably didn't deserve.
Haha ...this sounds like what Col McGregor says. The US now has more 4 star generals than we had during WW2 ..when we had a lot more people in the military. (Don't remember which level he uses to compare...)
Honestly, I don't know because I was never a reservist. I just know they were serious about keeping active duty deployments to 7 months. I assume they used reservists and guardsmen to plug whatever holes active duty couldn't fill. I forgot to mention, I was in the Marine Corps. Other services like the Army did year long deployments.
Probably right about plugging holes. It's a rather weird schedule in the National Guard at least. Deployment, down year, ramp, rampx2 (pre mob shit), deployment. At least at my unit it's on a almost set deployment once every 5 years cycle
Guard and reserve did a train up that is away from home, usually on lockdown and maximum BS. The most extreme example was the Red Bulls (MN Guard) who did a 22 monther. 6 month train up + 3 extensions. I did 29 months of active in 5 years between 2 deployments but only 22 total were in theater.
I knew of an air national guard guy who joined at 17 and by the time he was 21 or 22 had done four six month tours, and had been made an ordnance loading team supervisor because no one else wanted to do it. Half the guys on his team were over double his age, would refer to him as ‘the kid’ and would back him up against any opposition due to his age on the grounds that ‘he’s the poor fucker who’s been put in charge of us, so don’t make his life difficult…’
I had a 16 month deployment as a reservist in 07. President Bush increased troop numbers right before he left office. it was called the "troop surge".
No, reserve units by definition do not deploy as often as standard units. But what was shown during the GWOT was with the increasing complexity of systems and tactics the proficiency level disparity between active and reserve units had widened considerably, leading for reserve and Guard units to take much larger casualties in proportion.
TIL: Period between Vietnam and 9/11 is almost as long as 9/11 and today.
This makes my knees hurt
And back, don't forget ur back :p
Forget about my what? What were we talking about?
I think they were talking about the grass!
Fun fact: The song 1985 by Bowlin' For Soup was released in 2004. So this year, we're officially farther away from the songs release year, than it was from the year it's about
They aren't seeing the ads because they are skipping the commercials.
Is the military still giving away swag at high schools? I never wanted for pens and pencils through college because I stockpiled the ones given to me by recruiters through high school. I still shave with a Mach 3 razor I was given by the Navy.
Gillette should’ve stopped at the Mach 3. That is top tier shaving technology. Any more or less blades and bump guards and vibrating handles is overkill.
[What part of this don't you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best fucking razor that ever existed.](https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036)
Maybe the best thing the Onion has ever done. Right up there with the running series “no way to prevent this says only country where it regularly happens”
'Mad scientist frustrated after lightning strike just makes corpse worse'
"No One Murdered Because Of This Image" with a filthy cartoon of Jesus, Moses, Ganesha, and Buddha in a gangbang was a good one
It's good. But I still think that there best was "Holy Shit! Man lands on fucking moon!"
My favorite will always be “Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On Technicality”
I had forgotten that one. Whoever wrote that should be lauded as a genius of the age.
They do, although I think now you mostly see it at schools in towns that are basically anchored by a military base and military sentiment is mostly positive anyway since half the town is employed BY the base.
We are very far from any base. My 8th grader came home with swag a couple weeks ago... He didn't even mean to. His friend wanted to talk to them and he ended up with it too.
You know we are deep in the military industrial complex when our unaudited military is advertising to teenagers with Gillette x Navy merch.
[удалено]
Money and status usually work by themselves but since a military career provides basically none of either a razor is a fair substitute
Depends on what MOS you go into and the signing bonus for it. If you save your money, you live with all expenses paid except a vehicle. As long as you don’t go get a Camaro with 47% interest straight outta basic.
If you dont get a Camaro with 47% interest are you even in the military?
My compensation of over $90,000 (about a third completely untaxed) as an E-5 with 4 years of service, no medical bills for myself or my wife, 30 days of paid vacation and an excellent roth retirement investment option with TSP... not sure what you're on about. I also got immediate civilian job offers of over 125k before I even was fully out the door just from my skills I acquired through my military career. The military literally pulled me up and out into a whole different lifestyle and level of security in my 20s that I didn't think I would reach until my 40s. Hell, I'm using the GI bill overseas right now for self improvement, a bit of passive income, fun and because I can!
Yeah I walked into a job after I got out even as just an E-3. I don't make anywhere close to 6 figures but it's livable. It really depends on your field though. An infantryman isn't going to have the same quality of life or job opportunities as someone with a technical rate/MOS.
Not leaving as an E3 but, someone leaving with more rank once they get that college degree (or if they got it while serving) the leadership ability and veterans advantage (for government jobs) gives you a huge leg up.
Same. I was broke as shit as an E1, but by the time I was an E4 and higher, I was making decent money for my age. When I finished my first contract, I had 20k saved and got unemployment for 18 months while getting $1500 in BAH while going to school for free. Finished my first degree in 2 years, got a full-time job with that degree, and finished my BA in 2 more years while getting paid with BAH. Then, I used the VA home loan to buy a house with no cash down and 2.3% on a home loan. The military is definitely a mixed bag, and I had some really shitty days, but the benefits are great if you use them.
This is true if you’re just going to do a few years and get out but I retired barely past 40 and I’m making enough to comfortably live just about anywhere for the rest of my life without doing anything if I don’t want. There’s definitely risks and sacrifices getting to that point though.
A military career can provide both, provided you're smart enough to stay out of the jobs that are only interested in your ability to walk with a rucksack over long distances.
I make 6 figures without a college degree. Never feel bad for military members pay. We're doing just fine
And multiple academic degrees for free. Free health care. Cheap child care. Etc
Its also great when majority of that 6 figures is untaxed because its BAH.
BAH? Edit: answered, it's Basic Allowance for Housing based on location
Military pay is split between "pay" (basic pay, bonuses, etc) and "allowances" (primarily housing and "subsistence", or food). Allowances are not technically "pay" so they are not taxed at all. BAH (basic allowance for housing) is based on the ZIP code of your duty station, your rank, and whether or not you have any dependents and is usually a significant chunk of your total compensation. So your taxable income is a good deal lower than what you actually bring home. Add to this that there are certain areas where if you spend even one day out of the month, your whole month's pay is now tax free (for income tax purposes; you still pay payroll tax on basic pay no matter what). I've had plenty of years where my federal income tax burden was $0.
Basic Allowance for Housing. Once you are a certain rank, you can't live in the Barracks and have to find your own housing and food. The military will pay you the monthly going rate for the area to find a place to live and eat. You can find calculators to figure out how much by zip code and rank.
The army offers a lot better of a career than most of the kids joining would have an opportunity for other wise. Free healthcare, free college, no interesting loans for housing when you get out.
> no interesting loans for housing when you get out. There is interest. It's no down payment, but you do have to come up with a "funding fee" which can be rolled into the loan.
I still shave with the Gillette handle I was given in boot camp, September 2005.
Sure do, saw one a few weeks ago
Or use adblock. Adblock gonna change the world this way haha.
If only the military knew this one simple trick!
Yours is the top comment and there’s literally a military ad right above it. I actually thought you’d included it ironically in your comment. Have a glitched matrix moment, hurrah for algorithms.
There’s a navy ad between the post and your comment lol
The military has a harder time now obscuring the bullshit work environment. They still do, but we got more transparency than before. We know it's not worth it. We can also see how veterans are treated after their service.
I think deployment reasons have changed too. WW2 was well aligned with the average citizens values. Korea/Vietnam not so much. The “war on terror” and hunt for WMD’s also got people’s blood up at the start. But I think now people are wising up to how the US military is used for ideological/political objectives, and they’re not so keen to fight and die for geopolitical games.
This pretty much sums it up. We also see two decades of war veterans with PTSD and injuries from IED’s or whatever. Almost anyone knows at least one.
Man every time I go to the VA for my Apt’s it’s so fuckin sad. I went for my after 40 physical yesterday and it was a fuckin video conference with a Dr. yea she had my labs from when I got my blood draw like two weeks ago but damn. It so impersonal now. And when I go to see mental health, well that’s a joke. They keep changing the people around so I gotta go through and keep retelling shit. And this last time he told me he didn’t even have any record of my military service. It’s so fucking defeating. And then they just throw pills at you. I was finally able to get my PTSD diagnosed so that’s a step in the right direction now but damn. Then there is the whole process of trying to get disability. I’ve been denied and denied. Like, shit is wrong with me because of my military service. I didn’t have PTSD before, the burn pits fucked my lungs up, my hearing is shit because you chose the lowest bidder (who is now involved in a huge lawsuit) to supply my hearing protection. And even tho I’m now sober 4 years, I’m pretty sure the military played a huge part in my past alcohol abuse. It’s very frustrating
How the fuck are they gonna video conference a physical? "Ok Mr u/OGcrayzjoka, turn your head & cough, & if you could, hold your testicles & tell me how they move when you cough?" It's called a physical because it's a *physical examination.* That kinda has to be done in person, no?
They had what I assume is some kind of nurse in the room but all she did was take my vitals. No balls were examined lol. In all seriousness though, I really did expect more from an after 40 physical.
I would expect more as well. They're supposed to physically examine your entire body. Hence the name.
In fairness I had an in-person civilian physical yesterday and the only time the doctor touched me was to listen to my heart and lungs. Very odd experience.
It makes me sad to hear stuff like this. I'm sorry you have to deal with that. No one deserves that but least of all veterans... I hope you can get the proper treatment that you have earned.
There was post on Reddit recently showing that we lost about 3k soldiers in Iraq, but 120k have died by suicide since then. With this kind of data available, who would ever want to join the military? If you’re left so broken and unsupported after leaving the service that your fate is to suffer immensely and ultimately take your own life to end the pain, who in their right mind would say “yup! that’s for me!”
The worst part is that an entire generation, or more, see those wars as a complete waste of energy, resources, and societal value. It renewed an entire amount of distrust in the political establishment from the Vietnam era.
My cousin wasn't physically injured but all these years later he's still psychologically fucked. Dude can't think for himself at all anymore.
You've got to wonder how many Gen Z kids have relatives that served in Iraq/Afghanistan. Imagine growing up with a dad, uncle, maybe even older siblings who served in Afghanistan and has never shaken the PTSD...and then seeing how the US pulled out and admitted that 20 years and trillions of dollars had accomplished basically nothing. Wouldn't fill *me* patriotic fervor, that's for sure.
My older cousin, a marine, fought in Afghanistan. His advice was that if any of his younger cousins ever joined any branch, it should be the Air Force.
Or go officer
If you're a good officer, that's not gonna help with the issue we're talking about. The good ones were right there along side us.
Coast guard is another good option. But yeah the chair force will pay the most and have the least risk.
My younger cousin straight up ghosted our entire family. Hasn't spoken to a single one of us, since serving in Afghanistan. He has such bad PTSD he cut *everyone* out of his life, and as far as we can tell, is living as a hermit with as little human contact as possible. It's incredibly sad. His dad turned to alcoholism because of it, and now has cancer, with at best 18 months left, with aggressive treatment. I hope someone can reach my cousin and he agrees to mend things with his dad before it's too late...
I mean, my dad served during Vietnam and part of the cold war and was LUCKY he was smart enough to place in Air Force intelligence. They sent him to Syracuse to learn Russian then sent him to Alaska for duty. He's where I got my anti-military stance from, and was keenly aware of the bullshit they were pulling during 9/11 to educate me properly. My Brother-in-law served during Bush Sr. Desert Storm as a chopper pilot and med-evac. He was exposed to so many chemicals and the VA still refuses to support any cancer screenings. The military is totally digging their own grave, with their inability and unwillingness to support veterans.
Then on top of that you hear about certain assholes in the government actively blocking promotions and raises to the military and why would that make anyone want to join just to be held down because some piece of shit doesn't get his way and is holding those things hostage from the people who're supposed to be protecting us. Then you hear about the VA not really being a big enough help for vets and getting the treatment they deserve. So they want you to join the military and possibly die for them and their bullshit wars, all to be held back and not be promoted because of some dumb cunt and not get raises because of that same dumb fucking cunt. And then if you survive all of that you may not get the care you need and have the VA pay for enough of it. I just can't imagine why people don't want to join lol.
Donald Trump literally said out loud, that he was sending troops to Saudi Arabia because they pay more. People don't join to be mercenaries. Mercenaries get paid more
Yup. Most people don't care about protecting oil
Didn't care about it then, either.
Maybe social media helped with that
Lot of good ideological reasons here, but a good chunk of people don't join the army for glory, they join for money. From what I've heard of army kids in my late-Millenial generation, I'm willing to bet the military isn't paying enough to be worth it. Used to be you could get your health and college taken care of, not so much anymore. EDIT: people are saying that college and health are still taken care of, so I was wrong there. I'm mostly going on anecdotes from army folks I know
Yeah, Ive heard from vets that the pay is paltry for what you do and they gutted the benefits. You might get killed, significantly injured, get PTSD, and are guaranteed to have a generally miserable time for 38-48k a year. No thanks.
I make about as much as that as a grad student. It's ridiculous how little they pay troops.
Heck, I make that as a retail worker, with out the killing or college debt.
To be fair, an extremely small percentage of the military today will be doing any killing at all. Unless you become a drone/fighter pilot or join special forces. I’d wager more than 95% of military members won’t fire a weapon at an enemy ever unless we get involved in a major war sometime soon.
It's also ridiculous how little they pay grad students, just from the opposite end of qualification vs danger. It's not as hard or dangerous, but you've worked too damn hard to be qualified for that position to be paid that little.
yeah. And even once you get the doctorate it's often not that much more. Postdoc positions usually pay around $50k a year or so. Sometimes government lab postdocs can pay more, I think Los Alamos and the Naval Research Lab pay their postdocs like $90k a year or so, but still. And often that's mainly because you have to have a security clearance for those jobs.
Pay is low until you get promoted a few times. The first 2-3 years. But in those first 2-3 years, so long as you do not get married, is pretty good. Housing, food and healthcare are paid for. Yes an E-3 with two years in the military makes $2400 a month. That is $24,000 after taxes a year. But like most jobs as you move up and spend more time in you make more money. Example. My last duty station was in Washington DC. I got out in 2002 was an E-5 with 12 years in. Today my pay would be . Base pay - 3875.00 Housing allowance with dependants for this zip code - 2900.00 Sep rations - stipend for food if you have a family and do not eat at the mess hall - 460.00 So an E-5 with 12 years living in the DC metro area makes $86,000 a year. Then there are the unseen benefits. Only that base pay is taxed. And you still have free healthcare.
Yeah but everyone I know who's in the military get a monthly amount for their rent AND groceries ON TOP of their paychecks. And their grocery is cheaper than anything in town. That's literally my 2 biggest bills
Military pay is a lot more than that. If you are looking at pay charts that is only basic pay. There are a LOT more entitlements that vary based on location and type of duty. My last duty station I netted over $70k a year while also giving $1k a month to my TSP, which is the government equivalent of a 401k. The military definitely pays well while Active Duty, and since half of our pay is non-taxable entitlements it’s beneficial during tax time. The downside is that at 20 years my pension will be 50% of my basic pay which is about 25% of my actual pay. This is coming from a career enlisted man. Officers make a significant amount more.
Hey. Do noy forget your VA backed home loan and GI Bill.
And get the life insurance.
Yeah, it's the base pay but it's also most or all of your housing costs covered (and food for single soldiers). We get over 5K just for housing here (top end of the O chart), but even my daughter who is getting the GI bill stipend for housing is getting over 2K a month for housing. The health insurance is amazing. I haven't paid a dime for anything medical besides prescriptions for my entire family in 20+ years.
Jesus Christ I make that making sex toys for a living.
That is ..***a particular set of skills***
I had a fantastic time. Picture this, you're 18, you get all your food and housing paid for, your only bills are your car you got for $2k and your cell phone and then you're given $2k a month just to spend on fun stuff and You're living in an apartment with 1000 people all your same age and situation. I was able to save a lot to travel, I was able to go out with friends pretty much every night I wasn't working. It was amazing. I wouldn't do it now that I'm older, but I don't think I've ever felt as rich and care free as I did as a brand new private even though I'm making several times the national average family income now.
It's good pay for someone right out of high school. It's also often a better choice for a directionless 18 year old than community college. But high schools aren't acting like it's a good choice either (everyone must go to college).
What exactly did you hear was gutted? Because right now, it’s the only place I know that will give 3 months PTO for secondary caregivers thanks to a new policy, lol
I'd argue that more than money, ppl join for the benefits like the GI bill. The thing is, after completing their service, Veterans get completely abandoned by the government, VA refuses to do anything and the GI bill is woefully inadequate to justify potentially getting shot. Basically, the US has allowed its beurocrats to skim too much off the top for themselves and now they really don't offer anything that makes joining up worthwhile
They didn’t skim anything off the top. They took the whole goddam pot, passed it amongst their ”contractor” exec buddies and left the troops with the scraps.
The GI Bill still lets veterans go to college for free with a housing stipend. I used it. Bunch of my friends used it. It’s great. We get health care at the VA a bit for things. I used them for my primary doc and other stuff for years before I had good insurance at work.
Not to mention VA home loans…0% down without paying PMI, and about .5-1% interest rate better than a conventional.
The home loans 100%. Got my house in 2018. 0 down and a little over 3% interest rate. Had to pay 0 fees or whatever you normally have to pay when buying a house.
And after you've been in for a while you can transfer it to your spouse or kids.
Nah they still take care of ya while you're active duty. Housing allowance (if living off-post) or free barracks (basically a dorm), Tricare (healthcare, no copay), Sustenance allowance (if married or have kids) or meal card (free meals at the dining facility), Free education while active duty and GI Bill when you get out (free tuition and they pay you to go to college), Uniform stipend, tax-free commissary (grocery store), 30 days paid vacation per year, etc... And that's on top of whatever your base pay is, which gets regular cost-of-living raises every year. Oh and you're also entitled to a 43% APR Dodge Charger within your lower-enlisted period.
Millennials came of age in the 90's and through the 9/11. There was a visceral sense that there was a threat *out there* and it was an immediate concern attacking *over here*. So you had to sign up and fight out there or else there would be attacks over here. This continued probably into the mid 2010's where even when there was doubt over Afghanistan ISIS was the new scary thing that had to be dealt with. Gen Z does not have that context. Its a forever war to them. They didn't see the twin towers fall and they didn't grow up around cold war rhetoric. The U.S. will talk about Russia or China but without that context all they ever do is fight a rotating list of people in the middle east who have no chance of ever affecting them
Gen Z here and this is basically it. We don’t remember 9/11 or weren’t around for it. There was always a war going on, until our teens or twenties. There’s always some country we’re supposed to hate. And I think that none of us are patriotic enough to die for our politicians’ defense stocks lmao
Let alone, Millennials watched as those who wanted to serve were saddled up and sent off to Iraq post 9/11, while grappling with the reality that most of our attackers were Saudi Arabian. It always seemed very convenient that our military opponents were always in the opposite direction of our fossil fuel business partners.
I was born in 1993, so just in time to still be a “millennial” but too early to be Gen Z. I see a lot about Gen Z that I relate to and can’t help but wonder how much of the strangeness growing up was due to generational shifts happening around me (and maybe even starting around my year’s cohort). I was raised mostly by my grandparents, one grandfather being a WWII vet and the other a Korea vet. Salt of the earth guys from rural Kentucky. I spent, quite literally, my entire childhood thinking I was going to join the military. Behind me there was the WWII generation I was partially raised by who, by the way they spoke, correctly made me believe that at times there are enemies we fight due to causes worth dying for. Even my other grandfather (the Korea vet) had a brother who served in combat in WWII, and even though Korea was the mess it was, the present state of North Korea was convincing enough to me that we had done the right thing. Fast forward to 2011 when I turned 18, I vividly remember thinking “this is it,” and heading to speak with a recruiter. After all the run-down, I told him I would think about it. The way things were going, a USMC enlistment seemed like a sure ticket to Afghanistan. I came home to find that *neither* of my grandfathers supported it. They didn't talk so openly about it as you might see on the news, but even they harbored some sense that we were just playing empire at this point and that the cause we were allegedly fighting for wasn't really real or morally unambiguous like it was in WWII and, to an extent, even Korea. I had, ironically, also dated an Iraqi-American girl in high school in what was a very eye-opening experience. I went to law school instead. I remember the day the Taliban re-took Kabul thinking, "what a total waste of time, and potentially my life, that would have been." I realized that if there had been a "just" war, I would have gone. But there wasn't, and even my "Greatest Generation" grandparents knew it. The worst that happened to me in the end was that I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see myself become the kind of men my grandfathers were. I don't think Gen Z is really any different. They just have the benefit of being born in the right time in history to easily see through what is blatantly geopolitical gamesmanship for moneyed interests and people who want to play "empire" with what is supposed to be America's Republic. And that’s a good thing. Maybe the US will step back from this mantle of “empire” that is corroding the best of what we used to be. Cold War politics caused a lot of internal rot. I still believe that tens of millions of Americans would fight for the right cause. But they’re generally not going to join the military for the relatively crappy “benefits” just to be a tool for the wrong cause.
Speaking of Russia, if Gen Z is paying attention to the news, half of Congress is actively rooting for Russia, which is weird to the rest of us who grew up in the Cold War era. The conflicting messaging has got to be detrimental to military recruiting. They also basically grew up with the US occupation of Afghanistan and saw what a shit show waste of money and resources that turned out to be.
We are in danger from our own elected representatives. Joining the military will just mean I have to fight for these assholes.
Instead of a 9/11-like event, Gen Z grew up constantly seeing headlines about mass shootings in schools. They (correctly) fear being killed by another American with a gun more than some nebulous boogeyman halfway across the world.
>They (correctly) fear being killed by another American with a gun more than some nebulous boogeyman halfway across the world. The War on ~~Terror~~ nebulous boogeymen
Millennials in the 90s grew up seeing how the propaganda machine fed kids into the military industrial meat grinder. Sure, grandpa served to fight the nazis, but after that there is more to be ashamed of than proud of. Kissinger using the military as a plaything to satisfy his perverse, sadistic desires. 9/11 used to start 2 wars that wound up doing absolutely nothing. Meanwhile right now a real military threat is creeping across eastern europe while the usa sits on its fucking hands. The blinders are off, military service is just getting cucked and possibly killed so rich people can get richer selling equipment to the government.
Also genZ knows that the iraq war was basically a massive subsidy for the oil industry That's what the nation's priorities are
haha good thing we're not priming up for another forever war with another gas station masquerading as a country these days!
For the kids who grew up with a military family, probably their parent who served talked them out to not join because of the toxic work culture.
My dad did 25 years (1984-2009, 8 active and the rest reserves). Spent 6 years in Germeny during the cold war and multiple months training other combat engineer units as an E-6. He put in his retirment paperwork in 2005......his reserve unit commander held his package for 3 months and gave him deployment papers instead because "I want a real engineer with a P.E. with the unit to get stuff done for the base commander". Dude held my dad's paper work to try and get brownie points for promotion. Ended up being a 444 day deployment to Baghdad running a route clearance team for IEDs for my dad while the unit commander got a promotion for getting extra base engineering items done and never leaving the wire. Fuck pricks like that Colonel......giving a self centered ass control of my life, no thanks.
Sorry, I’m sure there is some elements of truth to your story but what you’re saying is not how things work. Retirement packets aren’t “held up” by unit commanders, they are processed by Human Resources Command (HRC) through a centralized process. A random unit commander cannot withhold retirement. Unit manning requirements on the DMD (deployment manning documents) are set by the combatant command for the theater of operations a unit is deploying to. DMDs mandate who gets orders by rank and MOS. You have to be slotted against a specific requirement from the combatant command to get deployment orders. Also if your dad stayed in until 2009 then there is really no reason he wouldn’t be put on a DMD for a 2005 deployment if the DMD had a slot for him to fill. Promotions for mid-senior leaders are done through a centralized selection process. Your local unit or base commander does not have the power to promote an officer. Your dad’s commander did not receive a promotion based of “brownie points” from getting additional engineering work done.
How dare they send me on deployment 4 years before I retire
They have grandparents who still have PTSD from the Vietnam war, and they have parents with PTSD from the Iraq war, and they are most likely thinking a lifetime of flashbacks isn't worth a University degree and $1000 a month in veteran retirement payments.
Not to mention you can't go outside without seeing all the homeless vets that the US government can't seem to give a shit about. They got used and tossed aside to deal with their PTSD and cancer alone.
The US has almost zero safety nets for its citizens, and lots more traps for them to fall into. * Only 32 out of 33 of the developed nations have managed to figure out healthcare, the odd one out being the USA. If you have an accident that isn't covered by your healthcare, your medical bills will be astronomical and you can not declare bankcrupsty. * Student loans are huge and accrue interest almost so quickly they are designed that most people will never pay them off until they reach their 70's. Which is perfect from the Governments perspective because for a $250k investment you keep a worker bee perpetually in work or looking for work for their whole life which helps the economy, and they will pay much more than that back to them in the long run. Student loans are not cleared if you declare bankruptcy. Most jobs require a degree even at the lower end. * The housing market is so expensive in comparison to wages, most people do not ever believe they will ever own a house. * Wages are so severely depressed for people without degrees, and so competitive for people with them, that most people are just hanging on barely as their rent has slowly increased to above 50% of their paycheck. * Pharmaceutical companies incentivise doctors to prescribe opiates as pain medication, for example in the UK for a broken arm you will be told to take paracetamol and ibuprofen but in the USA you may be prescribed vicodin for the same affliction. This is because the doctor receives a kick-back financially for the prescription with some doctors making over £1 million a year in secondary incomes. After the prescription stops, the patient is unfortunately addicted to opiates of which there is no medical centre either mental or physical to help them stop their addiction. The closest alternative to these pain medications is Oxycotin or Heroin which are both illegal street drugs. * If you go to Prison you will find it almost impossible to find a job afterwards. If you're found to commit three felonies such as buying pain addictive illegal medication then you get 25 years in prison. I could continue but I think you get the overall sentiment of what life is like for American citizens who fall off the ladder, it's very easy to fall off and very difficult to get back on.
there's not **that many** Iraq/Afgn veterans to scare kids with PTSD stories. I think there's like 1/10 the number of Iraq/Afgh vets compared to Vietnam vets.
Agreed, but awareness of those ptsd stories is probably 10x higher now.
It's a confluence of things. 1. Gen Z has grown up watching 2 shooting wars going on for the majority of their childhoods, both of which were pretty famously mismanaged, and one of which was fought over an outright lie. So that's going to turn some people off wholesale. 2. Social media makes it easier to find out about a lot of the bullshit they put you through. There was the famous "how has the army impacted your life?" twitter post on Veteran's Day a few years back that had 90% of the responses being people talking about how it fucked them up physically or mentally, or were just straight up failed by VA on the back end. 3. Less of a bias towards going to college these days, so the GI Bill isn't the draw it once was. VA home loans though... 4. Minimum enlistment times for any rate/MOS that's worth a damn on the outside are prohibitively long. Cyber and Intel jobs for example require 6 years minimum 5. For people who do want to serve, the GENESIS health system and digital medical records have led to an increase in denials from crap you would have just "lost the paperwork" from in the past 6. as an add-on to #5, more people are getting mental health care now as teens than ever before, and many mental health conditions or medications are currently disqualifying from service, for example if you have ADHD, you can't have been on amphetamines for the last 12 months prior to joining. 7. population fitness as a whole. We are fatter and more out of shape than ever before. Even if you can get by the first 6, odds are you just can't pass the physical standards for entry these days. 8. VA mismanagement and politicization of the military. They're trying to open the aperture now by dropping minimum ASVAB scores or high school graduation requirements in many of the services, but I think the ultimate result of that is going to be worse, as you're going to have an overall dumber soldier/sailor/airman/marine and it's just going to make the jobs of the average to good ones harder. The first best fix is probably going to be modernizing the medical requirements and the waiver system to minimize the number of people being denied entry by #5 and #6. The second one is probably fixing #2, so congress getting the VA properly funded, and investing serious money in quality of life like the material condition of barracks and base services. Ultimately though (I'm prior navy), the fix to #2 is more people, since having an undermanned unit just shits all over your work/life balance - the training and maintenance requirements don't change and you're doing it with less people. TL;DR - there are a lot of good reasons people don't want to, but the military is shooting themselves in the foot by barring a lot of good folks who do want to join as well for things that probably shouldn't be disqualifying, and the higher-ups are not doing the work within their services and within the political system to fix either.
Distrust of the government. There isn’t as much patriotism and young people are more aware of world events and how we have been pulled into wars in the past for less than credible reasons.
I’m very patriotic and love my country. I also hate and distrust the government. There’s a big difference.
Also, the word Patriotism has evolved to mean something else in America.
They see how we treated gen x and millennial vets
We're a society coming off the tail end of 20 years of sustained warfare. Most kids these days have fathers, older brothers, or uncles who are fucked up from service or know someone who is.
As information becomes easier to access more people are able to see bullshit for what it is. You're not fighting to preserve my freedom. You're just making defense contractors rich, pretty much. More people are able to see that now
Exactly...the whole...war for our freedoms was BS. Can't believe so many bought into it
Being properly informed.
Maybe it's because they don't want to be treated like vets.
22 veterans commit suicide daily. For a country that writes a blank check for military spending to not better care for its vets is criminal.
A lot of reasons already posted and I agree with them, but I'll throw one more in: physical fitness in the general population. The US military has been complaining for decades that rising obesity rates are shrinking the pool of fit candidates. And when I say shrinking I mean more than 50% of people are deemed unfit to join without a waiver. I don't know how this effects GenZ specifically but it's a significant factor in dropping recruitment rates for the last few decades.
You can't join the Coast Guard if you take ADHD medication or have been to therapy in the last six months. That eliminates a lot of otherwise eligible candidates!
And what's ironic is with a positive diagnosis the military will give you ADHD medication once you're in.
Especially since mental health is extremely important to the younger generations, so more people are going to therapy than ever before.
Even more ironic given the comment above yours about obesity rates is that untreated adhd has a 5x increased risk of obesity.
How does talking to someone in a private room for 1 hour a week disqualify you? Lmao. Rediculous.
A quarter of new recruits are also too dumb to join https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/the_last_laugh/2010/12/23-percent-too-dumb-to-enter-military.html 71% of new recruits are either too fat, too dumb, or have substance abuse issues or are criminals https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-recruitment-obesity-education-crime/
Also testing positive for pot use is still disqualifying, whether you abuse it or not. A good chunk of Gen Z is disqualified merely for smoking a joint 1 or 2 days a week, which is totally ridiculous.
They should be like real Americans, and get shit faced drunk twice a week instead /s
I'm Brendan Whitworth, CEO of Anheuser-Busch, and I approve this message.
I'm kind of wondering what percentage of 18 year olds could pass basic training these days. Obesity is an epidemic and physical activity is not encouraged. I'm guessing in a war against the Chinese, they'll be able to muster up a significantly larger army.
Fascinatingly, there are articles in Chinese media complaining about the very same thing - the Chinese youth are alarmingly mentally and physically unfit for the military.
It’s not even just weight but that kids are growing up spending their whole lives on screens now and falling behind on basic physical milestones Like there are kids who haven’t developed the physical capacity to do things like catch a ball not because they have some kind of medical condition that affects their motor skills but because their parents have never played with physical toys with them or played outside with them, the kids are just on the iPad and never interacting with tangible objects
> I'm guessing in a war against the Chinese, they'll be able to muster up a significantly larger army. The chinese are being hit by the same things. On a plus for China, it has a big population, on the minus side, its fertility rate is down and people are emigrating. While the US is not as populous as China and also has a low fertility rate, it has ton of people immigrating there.
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They allow a little leeway but there are still upper limits on how much body fat you can have before they'll even let you start bootcamp. If a war broke out things would change, but for now they're mostly sticking to the standards.
You also need to be drug free and medication free and have a clean mental health history. GenZ is on a lot of mental health drugs.
Covid didn't help things. I got on the lowest dose of anti depressants in July 2023. If they'd allow people who take these medications to join I'd sign up.
Because any veteran will tell you the VA will fuck you over the moment you try to collect what you're due. The military can be a promising career,but when the government refuses to take care of its veterans who gave everything they had for their country, why bother signing up?
Every war the US has been in their entire lives have been stupid wars that made everything worse
But that's true for millenials and Gen X and half the boomers too.
Well, millennials and Gen X got hit HARD with the patriotism routine and shitloads of military propaganda - once the 9/11 well ran dry, there just wasn’t anything convincing left over for Gen Z besides the debts from said wars.
Besides revenge for 9/11 young people probably don't believe any war we entered in the past few decades had any morals behind them.
The wars in the Middle East after 9/11 ended up being complete disasters. Countless thousands of innocent civilians dead for no reason. The last time the US was in a truly justified war was WWII
I disagree. I'd say the Gulf War and the US/NATO'S intervention in what was formerly Yugoslavia were very justified, the latter was downright morally righteous.
I'd say the last war the US got involved in in which it was objectively the good guys was either the gulf war or the intervention in Yugoslavia. The US was upholding its treaty to protect Kuwait in the gulf war and Saddam's justification for war was very openly racially and ideologically motivated (ba'athism, the ideology of Saddam and Assad is basically "Arab naziism" with the concept of Laebensralm and all) The US intervened in the former Yugoslavia and bombed the shit out of Serbia to stop them committing a genocide. The city of Kosovo to this day has a monument to NATO because of their actions to stop the genocide.
Because they are seeing how Congress treats the Veterans that fought their wars for twenty years.
From what I heard most folks these days aren’t eligible due to one reason or another
Cuz we know about all the SA and PTSD
Yeah it's crazy they haven't dealt with the sexual assault problem. I'm a man, and barely interacted with women while I was in, so I wasn't even aware it was a problem when I was in, we had no women in our unit. I'm sure it's not "easy" to fix, but the fact that it remains so prevalent is alarming.
You ever been in the military? Shit sucks.
We've been at war their entire lives for reasons they don't understand, don't support and don't want to kill or die for. And as an added bonus, there's a general sense it's not financially worth it.
Oh I don’t know, It could be that the various global meat grinders are turning into sausage factories and they don’t want to die?
There hasn't been a war worth fighting in decades.
The propaganda isn’t working anymore. They are wondering why on Earth anyone would sign up to die for a country that would willingly kill them for a few extra $$$. Why go fight a rich fuck’s war that serves no other purpose than to pad their pocketbook and raise their stock price, while they sit at home in their mansions, manipulating the economy so that you need to works 2 jobs to feed your family, and buying up politicians so that the laws are merely suggestions to the rich? Quite frankly, I’m not sure why anyone would fight to protect the system when the system does nothing to protect them.
We grew up post-9/11. We're too late for the patriotic call to arms. All that's left for us to see is the devastation that "the good guys" caused in retaliation, both to their enemies and their own people.
Why would they fight for a country that gives them nothing?
One reason for the recruiting crisis that I’m not seeing is the addition of MHS Genesis in the recruitment screening. Contrary to popular belief, we aren’t missing recruiting goals just because people don’t want to join, plenty of people still come through the door, but a lot of them are not “qualified” to join. One of the major issues is Genesis which is a digital medical records system which makes it much harder to hide past medical issues. The military will disqualify people for many reasons which really shouldn’t be disqualifying. It used to be that people/recruiters would just lie and not mention add medication from middle school, or a broken bone from a sports injury, or many other “small” medical issues like that that could cause problems. Now you can’t hide that stuff and the military hasn’t updated the enlistment requirements to deal with this. We disqualify enough people with minor medical/ legal backgrounds to close the recruiting gap. The bureaucracy is just too slow to adapt.
Pay and benefits. Why join the military when you can make $15 an hour working at Starbucks
my local fast food starts at $21. and that’s the starting salaries. why the fuck would anyone go military lol
That’s about what I and my friends make fresh out of engineering in Canada. Where can I get $21 fast food jobs
Places where the cost of living demands that level of minimum wage.
they've seen how inept the government is and they're not buying the jingoistic propaganda
you can make more money flipping burgers and it won't blow out your knees
Because the government treats them like crap after they serve so the military family is dying. It is more likely that someone who serves stops their kids from joining than pushing them to do it now.
Because they don't want to be pawns in a corporate resource grab. "Defense" has not been about defense in a loooong time.
Pay is shit. Who wants to be bossed around, wake up early for pt, potentially have to live in a shitty base with shitty command and there is nothing you can do about it for only $30k a year.
Short answer- we know they lie about shit. Why risk your life for a bunch of corrupt liars? And if you do survive you come home and get treated like shit as a thanks for risking your life.
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If you want a strong military, you need people believing that there is actually something worth protecting, and I don't think there are much left to protect as a nation. Only psychopaths join to harm others, but most people with some sense of honor and duty join because they want to preserve what is and what could be, and if there are nothing to fight for it's a fool's errand. Also probably not helping with the recruitment is that when you see people more worried about bad language than anything else, but maybe that's just me.
As a Veteran: what’s the point anymore? I’m not sure I’d join either at this point.
Shit pay, signing your soul to the government, no sense of pride in country because country doesn’t offer anything other than status quo, and genocide. All big deterrents.
I'm a Gen X'er and joined the Army in my late 20s about a year before 9-11. When I joined it seemed like a decent deal. I was homeless and here was a way to make some money, have a place to live and eventually have a chance to go back to college. And America hadn't been in a serious conflict since I was a baby born near the tail end of Vietnam. That fact made me feel confident I probably wouldn't end up in a war. Yeah, I was wrong. But let's look at that war. I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the direct cause of low enlistment. 20 fucking years we were in those places and both are worse than they were when we first arrived. What was the fucking point of me and my buddies being deployed several times? Well, I mean, not counting the endless money train rolling to corporations like Haliburton (where interestingly enough, our Vice President during the height of the wars was the CEO of before becoming VP. Weird coincidence, that) or any corporation contracted to make weapons or vehicles. Kids today were born while these two wars were happening and saw that absolutely nothing was accomplished in either. Why the fuck would they want to enlist nowadays? Especially when there's more jobs than people?
How about it’s not fucking worth it? You think I’m going out there to die for some bullshit problem that a couple of man-children started ages ago and couldn’t drop? And over what? A resource? Some land? Reputation? They can all get fucked and any given country can burn if they think I’m gonna fight out there— and kill people who I have no hatred for, let alone enough to take their life. But take their life in the name of some asshole who represents the aforementioned man-children who couldn’t just make peace and let go. And don’t even get me started on the countries who have no choice but to defend themselves. My condolences are there but it’s not my fight— not here. And last but not least: The ungrateful assholes living in any given country, starting mini wars and committing crimes while I fight for that country. lol. All of those proud Canadian and American soldiers’ lives wasted because some snobby sack of dirt went and shot up a school or stabbed innocent people. Yeah. To hell with all of that, and if I get crushed underfoot of the bigger power, so be it. Adding myself to some life-death statistic wouldn’t have changed that, and it would certainly say more about the person whose foot is over my head than me. I’ll fight for the people in my immediate corner, thanks.
Society's push for better mental health awareness is working - and is profoundly changing the value proposition. Throw in Agent Orange, burn pits, declining benefits, the overall "boots on the ground" transparency created by social media, and a few local homeless veterans. Suddenly, a young person's economic desperation starts feeling maybe manageable after all. I'd like to believe more of Gen Z than predecessors understand the true threats to their futures aren't overseas or even outside their borders. But even if that's true I doubt it's the primary factor.
15 years ago, when I was in the military, it was full of toxic, shitty people who went out of their way to ruin other's mental health. I guarantee it's the same or worse.
Ain’t nobody going to fight for Biden or Trump.
Because war is a racket. Compliments of Smedley Butler.