The Army's Recruiting Problem

One suspects that there is more to this story. One suspects that our military’s inability to find enough qualified recruits involves more than young people who are too stupid, too obese or too drugged up.

One needs to mention, by way of context, that our current military leaders, beginning with the Biden administration’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, have gone completely woke. Wasn’t Austin’s first directive designed to sow dissension in the ranks-- by telling soldiers to go to war against each other, the better to remove all of the white supremacists and Trump supporters. Then there were the new flight suits for pregnant women-- as though our military had been so completely enfeebled that we now need to send pregnant women into combat. Doubtless, it has been making our enemies quiver in fear. And of course, let us not forget the military’s new willingness to pay for delusion affirming mutilation. As though that were not enough, a commanding officer recently told his troops that using woke pronouns would produce greater lethality. How stupid do you need to be to believe that?

Evidently, America’s enemies, watching the debacle at the Pentagon, and measuring the cowardice in display in the Afghanistan withdrawal, have decided that they have no reason to fear the American military. Doubtless, they have misjudged, but wars have been fought for less. Besides, when you consider what is happening in Ukraine, you understand that the non-existent German military was certainly not a deterrent.

Anyway, now that the military has gone woke, and now that any recruit might fear having military intelligence officers scour through his social media for instances of racism or even for instances of supporting Donald Trump, you might conclude that the best of American youth are simply not interested in joining up. And besides, would you want to go into battle led by someone who was promoted for diversity, not merit. 

That being the case, those young people who still want to join are often not qualified to do so. We read it in a Zero Hedge report on a recent analysis performed by the U. S. Army, about how it is not able to fulfill its recruitment goals. It cannot find enough qualified recruits. 

For the record, we do not know how many soldiers are leaving the army because of the pusillanimous Biden administration.

Zero Hedge emphasizes those who try to sign up for the army are either too stupid, too fat, or addicted to drugs. Tip your hat to Gen Z:

The US Army has a major recruiting problem and can't find enough young people who meet the basic requirements to enlist, according to Army Times. 

Lt. Gen. Maria Gervais, second in command for Army Training and Doctrine Command, sounded off Thursday about the troubling developments. She highlighted disqualification rates for potential recruits jumped from 30-40% (pre-Covid) to a whopping 70% this year due to obesity, low test scores, and/or drug use.

So, the percentage of potential recruits who did not qualify has doubled over the past year.

As we have reported extensively, school lockdowns and remote learning made people stupid. The Army likes to measure such things, so we turn to them for guidance:

She explained Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) scores were 10% lower during the virus pandemic in 2020-21. That figure has since increased to 13% for the most recent high school graduating class. 

Perhaps America's youth was dumbed down during Covid with at-home schooling via daily video conferences. The latest Education Department data confirm reading and math scores plummeted. Maybe those kids were playing too many video games or trading 'meme stocks' or posting useless videos on TikTok during the pandemic instead of opening a book and learning something valuable. 

I find much to like in the last paragraph. I especially enjoy the notion that young people, who were not very literate to begin with, spend their time sharing useless videos on TikTok, but do not open books and actually learn something. I suspect, as I have mentioned, that the rage surrounding TikTok reflects the fundamental illiteracy of America’s younger generation. 

So Zero Hedge recommends that perhaps the Army should lower its standards. After all, everyone is doing so throughout American, in the interest of diversity, so why not the Army:

Perhaps lowering the standards to meet targets is a question the service should ponder. Even though the quality is more important than quantity, in tumultuous periods like today, where the world is shifting from a unipolar world to a multipolar world, conflicts tend to ignite -- and the US -- one who has overseen the unipolar world for decades -- will fight 'tooth and nail' to maintain the status quo. 

And it happily finds a saving grace in all of those video games. It desensitizes young people to violence. 

At least the youth have one thing going for them: obsession with violent video games has desensitized an entire generation to all sorts of violence where war might not be a big shock. 

If we need more people to man the computers at Langley, to send drones around the world to destroy people, places and things, the younger generation is at the ready.

Otherwise, the school lockdowns, not to mention the largely inadequate education and moral upbringing that America has been providing for its youth has become a national security problem. 

Of course, we could also solve some part of the problem by dewokeifying the military, but that might be a bit much for the morons who are running the Biden administration.