Right now, many of us vets are looking back on our years of service and wondering what the hell we did it all for. We used to know – for the USA. Yet you look at the disaster that is our country, our culture, and our beloved military, and you just want to go find a wall and pound your head against it. But a lot fewer folks are going to have this problem in the future because a lot fewer young people are joining our military. The Pentagon can't meet its recruiting goals, and, of course, the fault is our young people, our potential soldiers, for being unwilling to sacrifice their time, and sometimes their lives, in support of the bizarre social pathologies that our garbage ruling class embraces.
The military lost our trust, and it seems uninterested in earning it back. Time for the normals to go on strike until the military becomes a military again instead of a camouflaged faculty lounge.
Why the hell should anybody join the military right now? Don't tell me that it is "to defend the United States" because that's not what the military's primary occupation appears to be anymore. Let's review. We just had former admiral and current Biden Baghdad Bob, smarmy State Department Spokesperson John Kirby, announce that a "core part" of United States foreign policy is "LGBTQ+ rights." You know, not a lot of normal people particularly want to suffer and bleed for that blue coastal fetish. Maybe they do in the rich liberal neighborhoods where Kirby's masters live – actually, they are happy for your kids to suffer and bleed for it, not their own. Oh, and you know what else is a strategic priority? The weather. Who is up to enlist in service of it not being slightly hotter in 200 years? And don't forget Ukraine – yeah, I know they promise we are just advising and will never get sucked into a war in the Mekong Delta. Oops, I mean the Donbas.
Combine all that with the fact that we aren't even allowed to protect our border from illegal aliens and the drug smugglers who are killing over 70,000 Americans a year with fentanyl, and normal people are going to shake their heads at the priorities of the ruling class and count themselves out of being its enforcers. Our national interest seems to be anything but protecting our own people. Young folks have noticed, and they are not signing on the line which is dotted.
Our military, which, not coincidentally, has failed to unequivocally win a war in 30 years, did what it always does when it faces a problem. It makes the problem worse by hiring contractors to help them solve it. They hired people to go out and poll young people to find out why young people were not willing to commit their lives to the hands of people whose gross incompetence and total corruption have been on display for the last several decades. And here's a surprise. You're gonna be shocked. The answer was exactly what the brass wanted it to be, exculpatory. Turns out the answer the contractors delivered is nothing that challenges the ruling class's established prejudices or preferences. No, the answer is that American kids are too fat and too sick and mostly too scared to man up and die in the service of our trash, ruling caste fantasies. Phew! No change or reform required by our military. What a relief, and how convenient! And how disgraceful.
Go tell the dead in Kabul that they were "scared," forced by the gross negligence of senior leadership to mingle in close proximity to unvetted Afghans so that a bomber could get close and blow 13 of them apart. They didn't hesitate. They didn't falter. They deserved better.
Here's what's missing from the polls – the reality. Even in the past, the vast majority of Americans can't or don't want to serve. They have their reasons. Mostly, the reason is that it's hard, and you can make more money doing much easier things out on the outside. Service is not for everyone or even most people. So really, when you poll about recruiting, you should be polling just the target audience, the segment of people who might actually ever join the military, to find out why those select folks now refuse to.
And a big reason might be that our ruling caste believes – and the military teaches – that these select folks are bad people. The majority of potential recruits are traditional and conservative rural kids, poor kids, and suburban kids, mostly looking to serve their country, maybe make some money for college, and have a life adventure. That's the reality. And a huge number of them are family members of vets since the military has become a family business in America. So it's these people you should be polling if you want to find out why these people aren't showing up anymore.
Here's what you won't find in the poll results. You won't find any reports of potential recruits' concerns about incompetent military leadership. Kabul, anyone? That part about not winning a war in 30 years? That's important. I was there the last time we unequivocally won a war. I highly recommend it. It's much preferable to these long conflicts with inevitably disgraceful exits under the leadership of those medal-be-decked losers in the Pentagon. Nobody wants to be part of a losing team, but that's what we are right now. You flag officers can tell each other that we are still the most lethal powerful fighting force ever and watch the Chinese laugh.
The potential recruits are particularly disgusted by the gross betrayal of our soldiers over COVID. These idiots threw out thousands of dedicated military personnel because they wouldn't take an unproven vaccine that actually doesn't stop transmission and doesn't prevent you from getting the disease. They were lied to by the generals and admirals and betrayed by the generals and admirals, and now the generals and admirals are scratching their close-cropped heads, wondering why young people won't commit their lives to their care.
Don't even get me started on how the military abandoned Navy Lt. Ridge Alkonis to the Japanese "justice" system. When I trained in Japan 20 years ago, our allies had far too much respect for us to reject a request to return an unjustly imprisoned American. Now they just laugh at us. And our military nearly cut off his family's pay! But hey, recruits, totally put your life in the Pentagon's hands! It's got your back!
And let's talk about wokeness. Supposedly wokeness isn't even a consideration among the recruiting base. Baloney. It's a huge problem because it's the conservative Americans who actually serve who are being denigrated and insulted by this DEI crap. Normal people take one look at what is happening – they hear about it from vets and the currently serving – and say, "Hell no, I am not going to devote four years of my life to sitting around being indoctrinated into trans awareness." The fact that we have a military so essentially frivolous that it allows men pretending to be women to share close quarters with females is proof plenty to the recruiting base that the American military is no longer receptive to normal people.
Here's how bad it is and how thoroughly this idiotic ideological mind virus has penetrated the leadership. Let me share with you a recent email sent by an active-duty command sergeant major to his/her/xir troops. You need to understand something about a command sergeant major. That's the guy who stands beside a colonel or a general and has the respect and gravitas to take that officer behind closed doors and say, "Listen up, sir, you're being stupid." And a good officer listens. A CSM was once a legend, but the "C" now stands for "clown." This is an actual email sent by a US Army CSM to American soldiers:
Spread the word.
Tell the ENTIRE formation.
Emma Watson’s HeForShe campaign invites men to join the conversations. “Gender equality is your issue too… Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong.” We should all feel empowered to “take action against all form of violence and discrimination faced by women and girls.” (Emma Watson UN speech)
When all of us gain traction on this first step we will all inherently afford this alienable right to all people that raise their right hand, and serve.
Take that, People's Liberation Army!
R. Lee Ermey himself (unbelievably NSFW) did not possess adequate reserves of profanity to adequately describe this woke nonsense. Now, who is the young man who dreams not of tough training and camaraderie in a band of brothers but of being lectured about the perfidy of his penis for the duration of a four-year hitch? Not the kind you want in your infantry company. Perhaps the military should be spending its time studying Hannibal instead of Hermione.
Now, I've got 20 bucks that say half of these brass buffoons don't even know who the hell Hannibal is. And half of those don't think Hannibal is worth studying because he was cis, though some may get past that because he was also African.
And let's not even get into the rest of the racial garbage and the political garbage where you get told you are trash and a traitor because of your race and your politics, particularly conservative, traditional politics. No wonder most vets are telling young people not to go where they are not welcome. You won't get that from the talking head generals on CNN. You will get it from us retired colonels, majors, captains, and senior noncommissioned officers. When young people come up to us and ask, "Hey, what do you think of me joining?" we tell them that if they join, we will support them, but we don't recommend it because you can't trust this military leadership.
Congratulations on losing our trust, generals and admirals and woke E9s – just like you lost the wars you ran. This strike does not make us happy, but sometimes people only learn the hard way, and maybe if the generals and admirals don't get their fresh meat, they might change course.
As for the rest of you, support our troops. You can best do that by electing someone who will ruthlessly fire most of the generals and admirals and make America's military great again.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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