Earlier on Monday, I published an article about how the Army's recruitment efforts suddenly switched gears from a focus on diversity and inclusion to courting the more statistically reliable pool of white middle-American men. It's a striking turn of events because it means that our military's lack of successful recruitment has left it significantly weaker than it should be in the face of a mounting global conflict that could see America thrust back into a World War.
(READ: The Army Ditched Woke Ads and Features Masculinity Again...Is This Bad News?)
There's just a problem...maybe even two problems.
The first is one you've probably noticed all on your own. The fighting-aged people of American society are none other than Gen Z, a generation infamous for its lack of patriotism. This is the generation that has been hyper-politicized like no other, so much so that a much larger than normal portion of it is convinced they're not the gender they were born as. Gen Z is so far removed from any meaningful conflict that it doesn't understand what war truly is.
(READ: War Is Hell...So Don't Start One)
Gen Z doesn't just have a noticeable deficit of patriotism, a good chunk of it actively despises America on the trumped-up charges of it being a nation of racists, bigots, homophobes, sexists, and colonizers. Watch this viral video from a member of Gen-Z who thinks that if a draft is instituted, Gen-Z won't answer the call because they're not scared of the consequences and, moreover, they don't want to fight and potentially die for this country because it supposedly hates them and so they hate it.
Gen Z explains why they aren’t worried about a draft🤣😅 pic.twitter.com/qUPAHnzU8P
— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) November 13, 2023
This sentiment is more common among Gen-Z than just this one video, and while it wouldn't be fair to shame the entirety of Gen-Z for thinking this way, too many do, and that can be a real issue. Some likely will choose prison and those that don't might end up causing trouble in other ways.
But there's a second, and probably more consequential problem.
We can expect those who have been indoctrinated by leftism to want to steer clear of our military and, to be honest, the fewer neon-haired non-binary screechers we have in it, the better. However, those who aren't indoctrinated and actually do have a spirit of patriotism don't seem to want to join either.
In fact, not only do they not want to join, their parents don't seem to want them to either. Or their grandparents...even if they served in the past. I was struck by the amount of patriots waving off their own countrymen from serving, but probably not surprised by it.
Why? Because this military has become too dangerous, and not just in the way of potentially getting injured or killed in the line of duty. That comes with the territory. What worries them is that the military has become such a woke joke that the chances of being injured or killed are increased thanks to incompetence and heavily politicized standards that look better on a DEI checklist than anything close to looking combat-ready.
They want mixed units of men and women, but this has already proved to be a disaster. As former director of the Center for National Defense, Thomas Spoehr wrote at Heritage, the military's insistence that the military be more politically correct has made it far less effective on the field:
In 2015, then Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus rejected out-of-hand a Marine Corps study concluding that gender-integrated combat formations did not move as quickly or shoot as accurately, and that women were twice as likely as men to suffer combat injuries. He rejected it because it did not comport with the Obama administration’s political agenda.
That same year the Department of Defense opened all combat jobs in the U.S. military to women, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter committed to “gender-neutral standards” to ensure that female servicemembers could meet the demanding rigors involved in qualifying for combat. Since then, the Army has been working for a decade to put in place the gender-neutral test promised by Carter. But after finding that women were not scoring as highly as men, and under fierce pressure from advocacy groups, the Army threw out the test. Now there is no test to determine whether any soldier can meet the fitness requirements for combat specialties.
President Joe Biden rolled out the red carpet for transgender recruits, making it possible for active service members to take time off in order to obtain a sex change at taxpayer expense.
These are just a few of the ways the military has gone from being a fighting force capable of destruction the likes of which humanity has never seen to a social experiment that looks disorganized, disjointed, and easy to steamroll over. Rest assured, our enemies are not putting an emphasis on being inclusive in their militaries.
If you're a potential recruit and you saw all of this, you'd probably say "no thanks."
The United States of America has effectively screwed itself in terms of recruitment. It attempted to attract people into the military who either had no intention of serving or hated the country too much to make service laughable, and in doing so it made itself a dangerous prospect for anyone who might have actually served with purpose and effectiveness.
If that's to change, then this administration would have to get very serious about reversing a lot of its decisions about the military, ditch the wokeness, reinstitute its former standards, and prioritize red-blooded American men.
It won't, though. So the best we can do is hope that World War 3 doesn't kick off while a Democrat is in office.
