GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The Recruiting Crisis Has Arrived, Part One.

So the Army and Marines haven’t reached that stage of crisis yet, but it’s getting close. In response to the “really bad” recruiting crisis, the Army is losing force structure and what is known as endstrength as well. Think of it this way, force structure are the units, and endstrength is the personnel who form those units into cohesive organizations capable of performing their missions. How bad is this? Well, according to a July 19th, 2022 Military.com article, “Army officials on Tuesday said the service will fall about 10,000 soldiers short of its planned end strength for this fiscal year, and prospects for next year are grimmer. Army Gen. Joseph Martin, vice chief of staff for the Army, said it is projecting it will have a total force of 466,400 this year, down from the expected 476,000. And the service could end 2023 with between 445,000 and 452,000 soldiers, depending on how well recruiting and retention go.” . . .

Every year, the Army has the greatest recruiting burden because it is the largest service with a huge variety of requirements for personnel. It also just isn’t the Active Duty Army as the Military.com article would have you believe, but also the Army National Guard and Army Reserve. Maintaining an almost 1.1 million person Army means all three components of the Army need to recruit somewhere in the 80,000 range every year, regardless of what else happens, because there’s a substantial amount of attrition through retirements, medical retirements, ending enlistments and the Army booting people out of the service for just about every reason you can think of, and perhaps a few more to boot. And so there’s an odd competition that occurs within the Army, as all three components are recruiting from the same mass of citizenry who happen to meet the entry requirements and are willing to give Ol’ Sam a few years in uniform in exchange for a daily couple of hots and a cot, a decent salary, housing, education benefits and medical/dental insurance on the cheap. The Army also competes against the Marines, the Air Force, the Navy, the Space Force, the Coast Guard, colleges and universities, trade schools, the Little Sisters of the Poor and the League of Women Voters. Ok, those last two are exaggerations, however, the Army faces immense competition which is only getting more intense as corporations are now offering a lot of the same benefits that Uncle Sam used to provide, but without the same perks as sitting in the back of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle at NTC in August, or unloading ammo from a truck in northeastern Poland at 2330 one February evening.

The real problem is that — after the Afghanistan debacle, which everyone remembers but which respectable people aren’t supposed to talk about because it’s bad for Democrats — people know that the higher command won’t have their back, and won’t support their missions. Add to that the increasing degree of woke idiocy and bigotry aimed at the biggest cohort of enlistees and, well, why?