In March 2021 I declared that President Biden is destroying the US military, and offered some speculation as to why he would want to do that. Today, every military branch is gripped by a recruiting crisis, so apparently I was right. But I don’t want to gloat because the true answer is a bit more complicated than that.
In my article, I argued that crusade against white supremacy, sexual assault, and transphobia would gut our armed forces as an institution.
Now every branch is facing serious recruiting and retention shortfalls. As of June, the Army, which offers signing bonuses of up to $50,000, had reached just 40% of its FY2022 recruiting goal (with just 3 months to go).
Unsurprisingly, conservative outlets like the Federalist were quick to blame “leftism” for the recruiting crisis. See this article, Thanks to Leftist Corruption, U.S. Military Recruiting Is In Total Freefall. From the text:
This military decay will continue under President Joe Biden’s disastrous anti-leadership and likely will take many years of concerted effort to reverse. Further, combined with the chaotic defeat in Afghanistan, America’s ability to deter its enemies from taking hostile action is at a low not seen since the late 1970s, making a major war far more likely…
Biden’s defense officials may hope money solves the problem, but they’d be better advised to look in the mirror instead. When you openly accuse the military of being rightwing and harboring white supremacists, insist on schooling them in transgender pronoun usage, and then force them to get vaccinated for a Covid-19 virus that’s less threatening than the flu for the young and healthy military demographic, you shouldn’t be shocked that they don’t want to enlist under a leadership they neither trust nor admire.
To doublecheck that the economy wasn’t the overriding reason why recruiting is failing, I spoke with a friend who leads a large police academy in Texas. He said the classes are full of new recruits (although in Chicago, Oregon, and Washington State, areas where police are under attack, things are different). He even noted an influx of police coming into Texas from other states to escape Covid-19 vaccination requirements for public safety employees.
Interestingly, this does closely mirror what I said in my March 2021 story:
A lot of the things neoliberals do sound really stupid and self-defeating, and it took me a long time to comprehend why they love horrible policy so much. To name one example, why was failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton so obsessed with destroying our armed forces, and why is President Joe Biden doing the same thing? Why in the world would he, just days into his term, decide to dismantle the military? Why would he declare a purge against “white nationalists,” a term that’s been misused so often and for so long so it’s meaningless?
I’m not being hypothetical in my emphasis about how incredibly destructive this purge will be. It’s already been happening for years, just on a smaller scale. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of innocent military members are rotting in prison for obviously false sexual assault charges. Even more people are getting kicked out for preposterous harassment and discrimination offenses.
Straight white males aren’t the exclusive victims either. This can happen to anyone. When the Neoliberal Gestapo comes for you, they don’t care what race or sex you are, and they really don’t care what dating preference you listed on your Tinder profile. They’ll haul you to a kangaroo court that’s so ridiculous you’ll start to feel like the protagonist of a Kafka novel. You have no rights and you’re going to prison for just as long and for equally made-up accusations as Sgt. Billy Bob from Arkansas.
I revisited the topic in a later article in June, titled the Real Problem with the US Army’s Woke Recruiting Commercial:
Three quarters of Americans are white. Our military roughly reflects the demographic makeup of the population it was drawn from, and the vast majority of uniformed persons are male. How could the Army pick five spokespeople and not a single one is a white guy? The odds are astronomical, especially when considered in addition to the anomaly of three out of five of those soldiers being women. It’s not just unlikely, it’s impossible. Unless of course the Army was trying to not pick a white guy.
Intended or not, a lot of potential recruits are going to look at these pictures and videos, and feel like the Army doesn’t want white people. So many will simply not join. Many of those people would have actually been great soldiers but were turned off by the woke publicity campaign. And let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s absolutely true. The Army doesn’t want white men. We all know that if senior Army leaders could recruit 100% women and transgender people of color, they absolutely would. In a heartbeat.
It’s not that I necessarily mind being in agreement with America’s conservative establishment, it’s that I think blaming our recruiting problems on woke cancel culture might be too simplistic an explanation, and there are several reasons for me to say that.
First off, the COVID lockdowns just recently ended, and I struggle to find any historical event to compare it to. We shouldn’t underestimate how the pandemic impacted our society, and economy, including people’s interest in joining the military. If nothing else, fewer kids at school and job fairs should logically have some impact on recruiting, though of course I doubt that’s the only explanation.
Secondly, the media loves to report sensational headlines with no context. Our recruiting shortages go back years, during and also long before COVID hit. The shrinking pool of eligible young people due to obesity, criminal records, and medical readiness has been an ongoing and worsening problem. Even if the military was perfect and did nothing wrong, it’s logical to think the recruiting problem would gradually get worse anyway. Furthermore, it’s not just the USA. European militaries are severely undermanned, in many cases, much worse than ours.
Perhaps most importantly, this might be an example of journalists confusing cause and effect, “wet streets cause rain.” So rather than “the military has gotten too woke,” it’s probable, and honestly much more likely, that young people have gotten too woke to want to join the military.
Now I don’t mean to sound like a boomer ranting “kids bad, only like iPhone, and don’t want to work.” I have to raise the point that this meme of military people being more conservative than everyone else is simply not true. Studies about the political leanings of American servicemembers are muddled, and don’t show viewpoints significantly different than that of the general population. Soldiers’ political and cultural beliefs tend to reflect that of the population they were recruited from and that shouldn’t be an astonishing revelation. One point to bear in mind though, American men tend to vote more conservative than women, and the military is overwhelmingly male. All other factors, like race, education, religion… your safest bet is to see what those demographic groups believe in the civilian population, and the same is probably true in the military.
An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007 [emphasis mine].
The survey sheds light on how both Americans’ view of the military and the growing civilian-military divide may also be factors in slumping recruitment, and how public attitudes could cause recruiting struggles for years to come.
More than half of the young Americans who answered the survey — about 57% — think they would have emotional or psychological problems after serving in the military. Nearly half think they would have physical problems.
“They think they’re going to be physically or emotionally broken after serving,” said one senior U.S. military official familiar with the recruiting issues, who believes a lack of familiarity with military service contributes to that perception.
Among Americans surveyed by the Pentagon who were in the target age range for recruiting, only 13% had parents who had served in the military, down from approximately 40% in 1995. The military considers parents one of the biggest influencers for service.
Why “the lowest number since 2007?” What was happening in 2007? The surge in Iraq, of course. Why do so many “experts” have this deeply engrained belief that kids are stupid and aren’t aware of the world around them? If you weren’t interested in fighting in Iraq, then it wasn’t a good idea to join the American military in 2007. What is happening literally right now, and why is everyone pretending it’s not a factor in recruiting? The war in Ukraine, and the escalation in Eastern Europe. It’s happening and the media talks about it endlessly. If you don’t want to deploy to Poland or Lithuania and possibly die in a war with Russia, then it’s not a good idea to join the military right now.
From an April 25 article at Responsible Statecraft:
Early polls of American views on deploying U.S. military forces to Ukraine and enforcing a no-fly zone appear at first glance to confirm support for their positions. In July 2021, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asked Americans if they’d support the use of U.S. troops should Russia invade the rest of Ukraine. Fifty percent favored while 48 percent opposed. The share of Americans favoring the use of force had increased substantially from 30 percent in 2014, when Russia first invaded eastern Ukraine. A YouGov survey from March 10 to 14, 2022, found that 40 percent of Americans supported a U.S. no-fly zone over Ukraine while only 25 percent opposed.
But the notion of all-out war in Ukraine and the meaning of a no-fly zone — whose Google search queries peaked in early March — were abstract for most Americans until Russia’s new invasion in late February. Respondents to the polls above could only theoretically assess the risk of escalation from inserting U.S. ground troops or standing up a no-fly zone. As the scope of the war and Russia’s commitment to it became clear, however, the risks of escalation became clearer as well. In turn, U.S. public support for escalatory policies dropped substantially.
An Ipsos/Reuters poll on U.S. attitudes regarding Ukraine was conducted from March 7-8 — after two weeks of substantial news coverage of the conflict — found that just 35 percent of Americans supported sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, a decrease from 50 percent in July 2021. This figure was the same as of late March, according to Chicago Council polling.
On the issue of a no-fly zone, the aforementioned YouGov poll asked additional respondents the same question but included an explanation of what a no-fly zone would entail. Only 23 percent of those who were actually told what a no-fly zone issaid they supported one, while 43 percent opposed — the opposite outcome from the same question offered without a contextual explanation. (Though the late March Chicago Council poll saw support for a no-fly zone move back toward 40 percent, it did not define a no-fly zone for respondents as the YouGov poll did.)
Simply put, most Americans do not want to send the U.S. military into this fight.
If I was a betting man, I would say the war is the single biggest contributing factor in this year’s recruiting shortfalls.
That said, I still wouldn’t dismiss cancel culture’s disastrous effects on the military, and the calculating nature of the Biden administration. From my March 2021 article:
Why would Biden want to destroy the military? The same reason neoliberals want to destroy the police, schools, and every other government and public institution. After the Federal, state, and local governments have all collapsed into total chaos and corruption, they can be replaced by corporations. In this new Dystopia that will likely come to define 21st Century America, corporations will be free of rulers. More than that, they will be the rulers.
Pinkerton is a long-time player in American history, and has participated in many battles in the ongoing war for freedom and egalitarianism. And this private security firm has managed to be on the evil side of every single one of those battles. A recent Pinkerton press release announced that they’re standing at the ready to deploy death squads around the world to fight “climate change.”
This revelation gives us two lessons. The first lesson is that we are not dealing with a “left-wing” threat. Pinkerton is part of the fascists’ enforcement arm and has a long history of suppressing American workers and breaking up any leader or organization that threatens absolute corporate power in the nation.
Now on to the second and equally important lesson; Biden and the globalists can safely destroy the American military because there is a clear replacement. Not only is a functioning national armed force unnecessary, it is counterproductive to the globalist agenda. Any institution that unites Americans is an enemy of the globalists. I discuss this theme at length in my ongoing series about the rising threat of globalism against every human civilization on Earth.
Now please bear in mind the timeframe I wrote this. In early 2021 I was making some assumptions that weren’t entirely correct. In my opinion, the biggest incorrect assumption was the uselessness of proxy armies. The collapse of Afghanistan’s puppet government that Summer confirmed my belief, but the (God forgive me for using this buzzword) resilience of the Ukrainian puppet government and its armed forces is clear evidence to the contrary. One data point alone isn’t enough for sweeping conclusions, but for now we should assume that Taiwan, Poland, and the Baltic states would also hold up in a conventional war as long as Democracy™ continued to pump money into them.
So my prediction of Biden will rely on corporate mercenaries to fight future wars, I would completely rewrite as Biden will rely on the national army of ethno-states, supported by corporate mercenaries. Regarding Ukraine specifically, there are plenty of mercenaries, employed by both Ukraine directly, and corporations. There are hundreds if not thousands of job listings for various “private security” positions in Ukraine like this one offering $1,000-2,000 a day, which shows this is actual hazardous duty, not standing guard in a sleepy outpost in Iraq.
Let’s not lose the forest in the trees. The USA and allies withdrew all of their “official” forces from Ukraine. They also passed on a very obvious window to intervene when the Russian army still encircled Kiev, and still a somewhat realistic target. Now this week, the EU has walked back Lithuania’s blockade of Kaliningrad. For all the talk about Russia’s military “failures,” no one at the Pentagon seems to be in a hurry to get into a direct confrontation with them.
There’s one more factor that I was not taking seriously enough when I wrote that post last year. It was barely two months after the attempted Jan. 6 “insurrection” at the capitol. To me then, it was a propaganda stunt, simply a justification to root out political and ideological enemies within our civil government and the armed forces. Now, I think it’s much more than that. I’ve read and listened to so many liberals and progressives speak of the ”insurrection” with the same hysterical breathlessness that now I think that they’re not lying. They’re completely serious and do truly believe in this “threat” against them. I wouldn’t say their fear is entirely baseless either. Coups do tend to originate in, or are at least supported by, that nation’s military. In a time of potentially extreme economic and political crisis, it’s not unreasonable to fear equally serious unrest.
Ian Kummer
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“Coups do tend to originate in, or are at least supported by, that nation’s military.”
This is precisely the reason why January 6 was not a coup. Trump made little effort to enlist the military or intelligence services to overturn the election results. Rather, the military and intelligence services have been on the side of Trump’s political opponents.
Exactly. I think the “coup” itself was hogwash, but it IS something the deep state crowd is genuinely afraid of.
> resilience of the Ukrainian puppet government and its armed forces is clear evidence to the contrary.
Don’t think it can be directly compared to Afghanistan.
Perhaps because it is a real fight for Ukrainians to some degree? PilBan syndrome. Natural contempt to all Russian, feel of entitlement to suppress and rob Russians (by any definition, including people falsely labeled Russian sheerly to justify oppressing them) and then fear of retribution.
Ukrainians are not fighting for America but against those Russian savages. However stupid or sick it might be for you it can give a genuine motivation and a clear “frontline”.
Also, Ukraine was not steamed that long and hard as Afghanistan. How many years American overt occupatiom of Afghanistan had, more than 20? In Ukraine the occupatiom is still covert, can be argued to only long for 8 years, did not build up to the point explicit American milbases overtly shoot at weddings and hospitals.
And Taliban are not some alien “Russian subhumans” there, those are other Afghani, if of weird beliefs.
Basically, nazi in Ukraine have both an alien enemy and the idea. Pro-American Afghani never had former and had much time and experience to loose the latter.
If to talk about proxy armies i’d rather bring rise and fall of AQI/ISIS
> As the scope of the war and Russia’s commitment to it became clear, however, the risks of escalation became clearer as well. In turn, U.S. public support for escalatory policies dropped substantially.
Isn’t this disgusting?