And how does all the chest beating help the recruitment efforts? In current political environment, how will that appeal to people who may actually be considering joining the military, rather than going "that's what i thought, now that my suspicions of the military being evil are confirmed by the military itself, of course i won't join".
Military US Military Is Scared Americans Won't Fight For Globalism
- Thread starter Bassoe
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It shows the military can learn from it's mistakes with regards to PR and public perception, prove that the military is willing to hold itself accountable to the concerns of civies who control their access to kids, prove the military is not going to let pride or ego dictate override recruiting realities, and help restore some measure of trust in the military as an institution.
To people like you and hardcore 'rah rah' folks it won't mean much, however those are fewer and fewer in the US as a whole, and the fact is there is a decreasing birthrate in the US that means there are just fewer young people to begin with, so the military cannot afford to just try to cater to a shrinking percentage of the US population as a whole.
I worked with someone whose father got cancer from Agent Orange.
She served a large amount of time Actibe then went Guard.
She retired in December of last year.
She had no resentment for the military in Vietnam.
I work woth guys who served not long after Nam.
He'll, we have people here who served while that sentiment was still heavy.
@Sailor.X .
My grandfather got medboardes out of the Marines and lost nearly all of his friends he had in the service in Nam.
Still is proud he served and is proud I am serving.
This resentment is mainly for those that ate the media takes.
That took it that every combat arms was a draftee, that they were murdering civilians by the dozens.
Vietnam was a war that we shouldn't have done, but it was a war that had it not been for the political bullshit and media narrative spinning we would have won.
We shouldn't have done it in the first place, the public knew it and you admit it, so why would they have supported 'winning' it?
This is what the DoD narrative fails to grasp; trying to say 'We shouldn't have fought, but we would have won anyway if not for those dastardly kids/civies/politicians' just shows the hypocrisy of the DoD and how it still twists Veitnam up with 'we didn't lose on the battlefield pride' shit.
Stop trying to find silver lining and pride points in an unjust, unpopular, and stupid war the French dragged us into to help them try to keep their colony.
Edit: Like, did you mean to make the DoD sound like a Scooby-Do villian?
Is that kind of stuff within top 5 concerns of those of people (re)considering joining?
How many people are there going "oh i'd love to join the military, but if they aren't going to chest beat about politically incorrect questionable moves in Vietnam, fuck it, i'll rather join Blackwater or French Foreign Legion"?
And bingo, you accidentally have stumbled upon the core of the problem.
Why is that so, and what can be done about it?
"hardcore 'rah rah' folks" are the core recruitment target group for them in fact, how to make it so there are more of them?
US demographics are nowhere near as old as you paint them, you aren't Japan to say it lightly. Proportionally to population you also have nothing near, say, Israeli amount of military, and they have neither much better demographic nor less controversial military.
The demographic bits are beyond the military's control, they can only adapt to them, not affect them directly.
Increasing 'rah, rah' folks also requires a lot of things beyond the DoD's ability to affect, or affect so long as they keep up with the self-deluding PR campaigns and pretending Veitnam doesn't matter to the civies like you seem to think they should do. Not to mention that QOL upgrades for troops take decades to happen, while things like poisoned water take decades to be admitted, and decades more to be compensated, and that does not help create any sort of 'rah, rah' spirit.
I do not understand why you are trying to be so dismissive of what the article said, when the concerns are getting voiced to and acknowledge by the Secretary of the Army herself.
We would have won without being held back. I can be sure of that. And no it isn't the hypocrisy of the DoD. It is the truth. You know the Tet offensive? The surprise offensive the North Vietnamese did? What happend again to that offensive? Oh yeah, it hit a wall and stalled against the might of the US military.
What I am getting at, Bacle, is the people who want to join the military arnt people like you.
They are people like me, people that want to do more then be a civie. Or they just wanna join.
There are plenty fo reasons to join, and I doubt the people who feel like you would ever join.
Vietnam was over 50 years ago Bacle.
Most people who lived during it and were adults during it, are in thier 70s and 80s. Most who grew up with it and are anti war, had hippies as parents.
Then you have people like my own family, who due to medical board didn't serve and got lucky. He was supporting the troops and his old friends not the war.
Can you make the distinction between the troops and the war? The DoD was told to not do the job of the DoD, and look what happend.
Desert storm is when the DoD takes charge. Vietnam and A-stan are when the politicians take charge.
So as i said, fat check for propaganda.
Yes, as i said, DoD has limited ability to affect things. However, wasting the limited ability on demographics that are a lost cause due to the nature of their political views is even more ridiculous in light of that, especially if it comes at the cost of souring the military to the demographics with "lower hanging fruit" so to speak.
What i'm saying is that the military shouldn't pretend people with such views don't exist, but the rational reaction to realizing their existence would be to simply avoid wasting the recruitment budget, monetary and other forms, on trying to appeal to them, as it makes about as much sense as trying to sell Doom Eternal to Amish grandmothers.
QoL fixes can be done much faster than in decades, and i think would have more material effects than chest beating towards the left, and while at it, it's what people call a "money solvable problem", a much lower hanging fruit than such clumsy and hopeless cultural-political maneuvers you have suggested.
As these are political "concerns being voiced" aka things within control of the civilian government rather than military decision makers at best, or more often than not, not even that, but within the control of mass media as far as anyone controls these factors.
If you accept these are factors way beyond military's control, adapting and circumventing these factors is certainly more of a solution than virtue signalling towards people who are about the least likely people to join anyway.
Yall do know that if congress makes it happen in the ND Budget bills then the military has to do it.
For instance, the new gender neutral and combat arms specific tests the Army has to do.
So easiest way to fix QoL issues and the like is to have congress mandate them.
Because it would also approve the money to do so when bases have a lot of other issues besides QoL to focus on
For instance, the new gender neutral and combat arms specific tests the Army has to do.
So easiest way to fix QoL issues and the like is to have congress mandate them.
Because it would also approve the money to do so when bases have a lot of other issues besides QoL to focus on
The distinction between the troops and the war is very much a situational and conditional to how they ended up in Veitnam, and who's orders they took while there. Draftee's for Veitnam get sympathy, volunteers don't, and the leadership gets no benefit of the doubt at all.
We did not need to move on Veitnam at the behest of the French (the part you keep ignoring), and the people who had trained Ho Chi Min to fight the IJA tried to tell DC that repeatedly, to no avail.
Oh, in case you hadn't noticed, Desert Storm was only a success in the short term, because Bush Jr. undid all the good PR the military had from Desert Storm when he unjustly invaded Iraq in 2003.
And yes, it is clear you come from a dyed in the wool family who would never think to question if the DoD is still righteous, or think to dare to call a war unjust, because it might hurt the feeling of troops sent to fight said wars.
Also, once again, war is not won on the battlefield most of the time; war is a continuation of politics by other means, and the politics around Veitnam are a lot of why it is not a subject the DoD should be trying to push/find silver linings for.
It's also worth considering there are more people like me in the US now, or people even more skeptical of the DoD, and recruiting isn't going to get better if the military only tries to cater to people like you. And that ratio is only going to get more lopsided as time goes on, so it's going to be an ongoing issue.
It doesn't matter that Veitnam was 50 years ago, the cultural legacy of it is still very much alive and relevant for recruiting, as the Army Secretary was told.
Of course I also know you just expect to be able to fall back on a draft to make up the numbers if needed, so...
DoD flavored propaganda doesn't really work for recruiting purposes much anymore, and Hollywood doesn't really like the US military as much as it used to, for good reason (not just Lefty bias).
And as I said above, there are more people like me and those even more skeptical who are an increasing part of the population, who the DoD cannot just ignore to focus on recruiting from just one chunk of the population, a shrinking chunk at that.
Just like you don't win elections by subtraction, you don't increase recruiting numbers by only focusing on what works with established military families and the hardcore GOP DoD base. Recruiting from inner cities like Chicago is a very real, very important thing for the DoD, and places like that do need a different recruitment approach than works down in the South.
Also, some of those political concerns are things the DoD has some control over, particularly the 'up or out' BS that hurts retention and recruitment (sometimes people are good at one level of stuff, and don't need to push up or out), as well as the ability to pass the findings to Congresscritters to try to handle.
However, continuing to try to polish the turd that is the Veitnam war won't win over many people who control recruiter access to kids, and that lack of access is one of the main complaints of the article.
Well obviously, and these two things probably are related to each other.
Of course not - the question of whether "hardcore GOP DoD base" gets bigger or smaller is 100% a culture war question. As for other social group recruitment, stuff like criminal records, drug records, medical records, tattoos also are pretty major potential viable recruitment pool resizing factors, but loosening some of these things too much can also bring excessive problems, so it has to be done very carefully.
Yeah, that is some maneuver room DoD still has, it's a luxury that was viable when they had many recruits to spare (and also i suspect a little trick to have some trained reserve without having classic training draft), though i've heard they go around that now with lots of exceptions and other individual deals.
Again, that's media and politics matter.
>who control recruiter access to kids
For one it's the lefties who seem like the obvious problem here, and of course it's very political for them, rather than caring about the kid's interests or what parents think (they give access to worse groups eagerly).
Removing the tattoo restriction would definitely help, and is kinda a stupid restriction to begin with, as is removing people for smoking pot or having used shrooms (don't want crack or heroin addicts in uniform, but people who've used weed and shrooms...come on, do you want wokies or Joe Rogan fans in uniform more).
The up and out stuff is more about the corpo culture that has taken over the DoD. Said corpo culture is another reason recruiting and retention is down, as civie corpo jobs with just as much BS don't come with the loss of freedoms and restrictions on speech or political action, and usually better pay.
There are cultural issues in the DoD that are not the fault of Congress, which need to be fixed, and yet most of the time DoD people try to pass the buck to Congress instead of admit in-house fuck-ups/systemic issues.
I can imagine removing the restrictions completely would raise some controversies, but it is something that could be sold both to the liberals and the traditionalists - that's something with a long history, and pretty sure the restrictions were nowhere near as tight during WW2, Korea or Vietnam.
As for the substance use - total ban on any previous use is obviously kinda excessive if they are short on recruits, though there are reasons why they wouldn't want regular/recent users.
That is also something unfortunately highly political - lots of the elements of corpo culture is "please don't sue us" or "please don't sic a mob of nagging feminists on us" stuff, aka same reason it exists in corporations, so its shape and existence is quite a political question, as in it would need political backing to remove the issues this exists to deal with from the equation.
No, the corpo culture is uniquely suited to the DoD leading the charge against it from the inside, if the brass actually wanted to do so.
However, the brass care more about getting to retirement without losing their pensions to lawsuit's than they do about the well-being of their subordinates a lot of times.
I actually saw some bits about this in a DoD suicide prevention thing I saw on Discord a month or so back, that part of the suicide prevention stuff was about the 'up or out' mentality, and superiors putting the 'safe' choices for their careers above the wellbeing of their subordinates, and I expect it's not a small issue for recruiting either.
Let me see if I can find the link, it was actually pretty interesting on how the suicide prevention measures also included a lot of measures that would easily boost recruitment, including better family care and more opportunities for spouses to find work, along with better assignment/rotation considerations for having families.
Which is another thing that the corpo culture hurt, because corpo's don't usually care about the families of their employees, except in how to make money off them.
Bacle my late Brother was a Vietnam Vet. He spent one tour in Vietnam in the US Navy Riverine Force and was in a lot of firefights. When I decided to join the Navy a few months before Desert Storm. He did not discourage me in the slightest. He gave me good advice and had my back in joining. Not everyone who served in Vietnam became anti military.
Ok, key difference here, between the situations that are effecting recruiting and your experience; you wanted to join anyway, no one had to convince you, so your brother was just trying to give you the best advice he could for the decision you had already made.
That's not the case with the majority of the people these recruiters are obviously interacting with, is it?
The Veitnam War does not get positive press in the public sphere or DC for a reason, and the only people who keep trying to polish a turd are those already in hardcore military mindsets or retired military. Notice those groups are not the ones the article mentions being at issue?
Maybe stop thinking about the DoD from the inside out, instead of the outside in, and you'll see why some of the modern recruiting problems are made worse by trying to push any sort of silver lining for the DoD public rep, in regards to the Veitnam War.
The pride of past soldiers doesn't matter to most prospective recruits, not with shit QOL all over the place, and swallowing that pride as an institution is necessary going forward.
Maybe the rest of the DoD should look at why the Coast Guard isn't having nearly the same QOL/retention/rep issues the rest of the branches are, and ask hard questions about why that is.
It's barely more than 1/10 of the Navy with less long term deployments due to nature of it, of course it will have less such issues. In context of recruitment poll, numbers matter a whole lot.
Also, according to this, Coast Guard also has issues.
Why is the U.S. military struggling to recruit young Americans?
With a record low number of Americans eligible to serve, and few of those willing to do it, this "is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force,” said an expert.
www.nbcnews.com
Expectedly, Army has the worst problem, while more surprisingly, Navy and Marines don't have much of an issue, though in case of the first it's "Top Gun effect" apparently.
The suggestion that immediately jumps out of that is that the Army should probably have a close look at what Marines are doing because apparently it works better than what they are doing.
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So more and more it sounds like it's less all services have crap recruiting, and more just the Army is really, really in a PR shithole for a lot of reasons.It's barely more than 1/10 of the Navy with less long term deployments due to nature of it, of course it will have less such issues. In context of recruitment poll, numbers matter a whole lot.
Also, according to this, Coast Guard also has issues.
Why is the U.S. military struggling to recruit young Americans?
With a record low number of Americans eligible to serve, and few of those willing to do it, this "is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force,” said an expert.
Expectedly, Army has the worst problem, while more surprisingly, Navy and Marines don't have much of an issue, though in case of the first it's "Top Gun effect" apparently.
I mean I'm not hugely surprised, given shit like black mold and Camp Lejune's water issues being very public issues now.
Having barracks and water issues that would get a private landlord fined and ticketed for unsafe living conditions is not a way to bring in recruits.
. . .
Camp Lejeune is a Marine Corps Base... one of the Big Three along with Pendleton and Quantico.
Though that does kinda help your point. If the Army is getting the blame for things that are the fault of the Corps...
That said, I know from personal experience that there were serious mold issues on Quantico... I personally cost the government thousands of dollars due to me filing a formal air quality complaint regarding the mold in the building I worked at back when I worked on the NMCI.
I thought Lejeune was a mixed Marine/Army base, as the compensation commercials about the health issues made it sound like more than just USMC personnel were on the base and affected.
And good on reporting the mold formally, that stuff can have long term health implications.