What if they gave a war and nobody showed up?
If you lie to them repeatedly, they won’t come.
The foreign policy elite has sacrificed so many lives for so little justification. More than 7,000 service members and nearly 8,000 contractors died in combat after 9/11. An incredible 30,000 have committed suicide over the same period. Officially, some 52,000 were wounded in combat, many grievously. However, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs reports that the real number “is exponentially larger,” given other injuries in theater and conditions diagnosed after returning home. Finally, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians died in the misguided conflicts, innocent casualties of U.S. hubris and folly.
It is one thing to risk your life and health for America. But to instead die in such foolish wars? And to have your sacrifice so shamefully wasted? Patriots should preserve their lives for something better.
So far, the military has no answer to the dearth in recruits. The services are simply muddling along, considering small fixes to significant shortfalls. Adding recruiters and hiking pay are obvious steps. Reaching younger Americans and adjusting military routine to modern youth culture are others. Decreasing disqualifications and increasing physical fitness would increase the recruit pool. Retaining more existing personnel would reduce the need for new recruits. So would hiring laterally for specialty roles and introducing robots. Such efforts should help at the margin. Even so, however, they are unlikely to fill personnel gaps in the thousands.
The most important problem is that nothing has changed with U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, today’s potential wars are becoming more deadly. “We have strike groups, aircraft carriers with a Marine Expeditionary Unit outside Israel now,” observed Justin Henderson, a Marine Corps recruiter. He added, “We’re funding two wars, but we’re actually boots on the ground, drones above Gaza. So we’re already involved in there—and we’re not sure what’s happening in Taiwan. So this is a very tumultuous time for us, because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
No, we don’t. Yet nothing good is likely to come from being involved in so many of the world’s incendiary confrontations and conflicts. Washington continues to ask young Americans to risk their lives here, there, and everywhere for no good reason.
Uncle Sam’s determination to be forever entangled in foreign wars is a very good reason not to join the armed services. The best way to solve the recruitment problem is to end frivolous interventions on behalf of peripheral interests. The armed services’ essential task is defending Americans—not sanctimonious Euroweenies, kleptocratic Saudi royals, well-heeled South Koreans, indifferent Taiwanese, and endless others.
If the infamous Blob, as the foreign policy establishment has been called, refuses to abandon its determination to dominate the globe, it almost certainly will have to impose conscription. However, a return to the hated practice would foster resistance, intensify partisan polarization, and spur social conflict. Moreover, coercing service would reduce the quality of the U.S. military, hiking indiscipline, reducing retention, and draining morale. Doing so might put more people in uniform, but far fewer would want to be there and prepared to give their all in combat, especially in the frivolous interventions of late.
The Washington War Party continues to spend wildly to dominate the globe, threat of national insolvency be damned. However, the challenge of finding young men and women willing to act as sentinels for a conflict-filled global empire is proving more daunting. If Americans increasingly refuse to serve, the Pentagon will have to do more than the policy equivalent of adjusting the deck chairs of the Titanic. Republicans and Democrats alike might have to again put America’s defense first.
Yet another lesson of history our damned-fool political “leaders” refuse to learn: as a nation staggers, weakens, and eventually collapses, its military does also. It’s a truism that has held up unfailingly throughout the history of human civilization; in fact, it’s how third-rate powers are made. For more information, please see Once-Great Britain, Moslem-conquered France and Germany, and the other sick men of (Western) Europe.
If you’re currently serving in the armed forces: get out, any way you can, by hook or by crook. If you’re thinking seriously of enlisting or signing on for another hitch: don’t, just…DON’T. Amerika v2.0 is in no way worth your blood, sweat, toil, and sacrifice, much less your very life. The civilian “leadership” despises its own soldiers; the majority of our pig-ignorant population loathes the soldiery in general as violent, thuggish knuckledraggers, the warrior spirit which animates and inspires any soldier worth his salt as the outdated creed of bloody-minded losers—the combination of which two represents a threat to all they consider good and decent.
The title of the article asks, “Why join the military?” The way things currently stand, I can’t think of one good reason any sane, sensible person would.
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