From News Nation:
“US
military facing biggest recruiting shortfall in decades”
The U.S.
military is facing a recruiting shortfall, with officials saying there are not
enough people signing up to serve. Across the board, the armed forces are
experiencing a deficit of thousands of entry-level troops, according to the New
York Times — a number on pace to be worse than any since shortly after the
Vietnam War. Pentagon leaders said last month that ongoing military recruitment
is down 23% of its annual target.
There are a
number of reasons people have cited for this: the COVID-19 pandemic, a tight
labor market where civilian employers are offering enticing benefits, and that
fewer young people are fit enough to join the military. “The fact that
recruiters couldn’t get into high schools to be able to recruit young people,
for a year, 18 months, depending on where you live in America is a huge
hurdle,” Iraq War veteran Allison Jaslow said. Compounding the problem is that
although there are people who are interested in serving, they aren’t qualified
to, she added. This is “a real problem for our country, for our national
security, especially if we want to be a nation that still wants to serve our
wars with all volunteers,” Jaslow said on NewsNation’s “Morning in America.”
A “vast”
military-civilian divide is just making recruitment harder, Jaslow said. “In
previous generations, everyone had a grandfather who had served or everyone had
a family member who had served. And now few people even know us. So culturally,
we’re just very out of touch as a nation, with the military,” she said. “So
even having sort of that sense of duty or honor model to us, I think, for us,
at least for the younger generations, doesn’t really exist.” Jaslow says she
hopes these recruitment issues are just a “blip” for the military right now. “I
hope that this is just a year like many other sectors where we’re trying to
recover from a pandemic,” she said. “But if we don’t, if we don’t do better
next year, we should really be sounding the alarms.”
^ There have
been issues with recruiting since the Military Draft ended in 1973. This time
it does seem different than in the past. I think it has to do with Biden’s
Failure in the US Withdrawing from Afghanistan in August 2021 – where Americans
saw chaos and death as well as the US not helping its Afghan Workers who helped
us for 20 years - even though we said we
would help them. Another issue is how obese and lazy Americans have become over
the years. We need to do something to change the current trend or we may be speaking
Russian soon – they did say they wanted Alaska back. ^
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