I said it before and I will say it again here: Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) Lloyd F. Austin (General, United States Army, Retired) should be fired. The other option I’ve written about-that he resigns out of respect for his oath, his position and recognition of his incompetence-would evidence attributes that do not appear to be part of his makeup, including introspection, self-awareness and class.
My article from May 2021- How to tank Recruiting: Undermining the Nation’s Military Will Have a Cost –was about the deleterious and ruinous effect his policy choices-and incompetence or malfeasance-and it is likely both-would have on recruiting. My premise in that article was not exactly Nostradamus-like, based on the fact that in the era of military voluntary service that has been in place for nearly 50 years, the view of the institution by the public-but mostly parents-is critical to meeting recruiting goals. What parent is going to advocate military service for their son or daughter if their demographic is being maligned as a broad brush “ism” while the military leadership is not only hell bent on embracing social justice policy as a priority, but also evidencing incompetence as they go about it that hasn’t been seen in decades?
Polls indicate a precipitous drop in the public’s favorability rating of what had been one of the most consistent, top rated US institutions over the past decade or more. US Demographic data detail the breakdown of our military just about any way you care to slice it, but in particular by a variety of data such as race and ethnicity, as well as the percentage of service personnel represented by state. The importance of these data and the relationship to recruiting speak to the clumsy-but apparently deliberate-way SECDEF Austin and his staff have gone about setting his priorities and messaging since he was appointed. His continual focus on issues that seem to highlight the marginal or fringe element of the military and his non-stop social justice blather-in particular-gender and LGBTQ+-as opposed to the traditional main core issues that military leaders historically focus on, have not been received or aged well.
How bad could it be? This PJ Media article “Get Woke, Go Broke, US Military Edition: Army Recruiting Craters” describes the recruiting challenge as we head into the last quarter of the fiscal year: Army is 60% down from the recruiting goal, with the other services down an average of 23%.
From the piece:
The Army is tossing its mandate for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist in the service, in one of the most dramatic moves yet in the escalating recruiting crisis hitting the entire Defense Department.
On Thursday, the service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.
Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit’s academic ability.
A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service. Combat arms jobs such as infantrymen and cavalry scouts need only minimal scores to serve, while admin work such as a human resources specialist or public affairs require scores of 100 or higher.
A cursory review of how the Army revamped itself coming out of the Vietnam War after the first phase of the all-voluntary service came into being is likely the last time any such dramatic change or undermining of standards was pursued. The joke in the late 1970s-when the Vietnam stigma was still strong, somewhat hanging over the Army like a pall, when the uniform of the day was still the permanent wrinkles-er-press, that made as much sense as Class As in the motor pool, while entry standards had been similarly lowered to meet the demand in the wake of all the draftees departing, was typified by the joke about military police dog handlers-that the standard was the handler had to be smarter than the dog: but it was waiverable.
While in-processing to 2d Armored Division in 1978, part of the deal was to take a battery of tests, including the California Achievement Test. I spoke to the education center counselor administering the test to ask why? It was a standard test you would take in maybe 10th grade to qualify for advanced placement in high school. The counselor looked at me with something between bemusement and thoughts of a rat’s tucous-he said take the test and we will talk about it. I was done in about a half hour-he told me to go get something to eat or drink and come back in an hour-there were still people taking the test when I got back. He said congratulations-you scored first year of college across the board-as well as you can do. So what was the point? He said have you noticed that half of the class is not done yet-they are not taking their time because they are paid by the month–half of this group is going to average out at a 10th grade level, with the remainder below that-consistently. This is the first and only chance for us to get soldiers on track into programs to work on their basic reading, writing, science and math skills before they disappear into their units and discover none of it is necessary to get ahead.
I digress but the Army recognized this problem and went to great lengths to communicate to soldiers by getting their attention on periodicals-which featured hotness and flesh, including Soldiers Magazine and the cartoon hotties adorning the Preventive Maintenance Checks and Services-now PS Magazine (which somewhat in keeping with the theme of the below has a Pride woke message on its website-cause you want to be prideful as you do maintenance on your tank…)
The watering down of entrance standards is how you get to the above story. Military recruiters have these quotas for a reason, but the Army has standards for a reason. At a time when we are touting technology and the increasing sophistication of our weaponry-to keep up with our enemies-we can ill-afford to degrade military entrance standards.
The Biden administration and Austin’s poor leadership is 100% responsible for this drop in public sentiment. As public confidence in the military declines over time it makes sense the military would find an increasingly challenging recruitment environment as a direct result.
To step back a bit before working through a litany of Austin-induced or related problems, it is a fair assessment that military analysts have been warning about recruitment trends and challenges for at least a decade now. The market has become increasingly competitive with civilian labor rates for talent often above $25-30 an hour with increasingly generous “soft” benefits that are very attractive to energetic and capable potential employees. Coming off the COVID era where for some nearly two years hiring was problematic and uncertain-with many companies frozen in time-the proverbial floodgates have been opened and employers are pre-disposed to opt for ex-military who have discipline, good work habits and are fast learners.
We can’t forget the burden of service in the 21st century, where every soldier was going to see Afghanistan and Iraq-and upon return be eligible quickly for that short tour in Korea. It was not unusual for troops with six years in the Army-the old minimum service required-to have at least 2 if not 3 foreign service or overseas service hashes. The clock restarted at odd times depending on the circumstances of service.
This military.com article highlights another issue that emerged from the Department of Labor’s Veteran’s Employment and Training Service that tracks anticipated service member transitions as part of the budget process. The 2020 figure was anticipated to be about 150K transitions. But as tracked and reported by the Transition Assistance Program (TAP,) actual transitions were some 194K. The 2021 figure was about 196K.
The military has responded with a robust bonus program incentivized for both critical skill sets and urgency of start date. However, there is ongoing debate about root cause for the problems of recruitment and retention. Many believe the services need to modernize their recruitment processes to move away from traditional approaches based on phone lines demonstrating a lack of tech and social media savvy, and also different approaches to target specific demographics.
From the standpoint of the Army recruiting problem touched upon above, the main reasons for the issue include the following (from the piece:)
Only about one-quarter of young Americans are even eligible for service these days, a shrinking pool limited by an increasing number of potential recruits who are overweight or are screened out due to minor criminal infractions, including the use of recreational drugs such as marijuana.
In an opinion piece, the military blog Task & Purpose said gave two possible explanations, noting that advertising campaigns have badly missed the mark and that structural problems exist in the Army’s recruiting goals and functions. Recruiting has relied on a model first deployed in the 1970s when every family had a landline and the internet didn’t exist. The services have failed to embrace new technology, except in the advertising realm. Those ads have failed spectacularly in recent years.
Which sounds mostly self-inflicted. Have we not updated our recruitment model in half a decade? That seems unlikely. I’m more inclined to go with an alternative opinion offered in the “…Go Broke article:”
Military blogger Chuck Holton was more pointed in his criticism. He wrote in response to the Task & Purpose article:
Good article. Makes some salient points worthy of further attention by the media. But the authors miss one large reason why young people aren’t joining the military. The kind of men and women who are predisposed to selfless service are often those who have no desire to join the woke mob. Today’s military has alienated conservative, God-fearing patriots who aren’t willing to get the jab or sit through interminable struggle sessions on transgenderism.
The article also misses the point that there are far fewer American youth who can pass the physical and moral requirements to join. The numbers of waivers for drug use, cutting, and other concerning behaviors is at an all-time high.
Looks like the Army is finding out the hard way: Get Woke, Go Broke.
Part of the problem here is we seem to have reached an era where political correctness, virtue signaling and social justice aptitude or wokeness seem to be valued attributes in our leaders. How else do you explain the following exchange before congress from the same article:
What does he mean by the Army going woke? Last year, as our sister site Townhall pointed out, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, defended Critical Race Theory at West Point:
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained in a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday why he supports bringing Critical Race Theory into the American military while admitting “I’ll obviously have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is.”
“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read,” Milley said. “And the United States Military Academy is a university, and it is important that we train, and we understand,” he added as a rationale for teaching Critical Race Theory.
“I want to understand ‘white rage,’ and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” said the most senior military officer in America, linking the term to the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
Understanding Critical Race Theory, according to Milley, is important to find out “what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? I want to find that out,” he said. “I want to maintain an open mind here and I do want to analyze it. It’s important that we understand that. Because our soldiers, sailors, airman, marines, and guardians come from the American people, so it is important that the leaders, now and in the future, do understand it.”
So this idjiot was advocating something he thinks he understands because of the English words describing it-but in truth he knows nothing about it? Sign me up to serve with leaders like that! That is why I called for him to resign in several articles last year along with his incompetent boss Austin (and am doing so here…) Service members are sharp and it would not be lost on any who heard the above exchange-who weren’t under a rock-that the top uniformed officer in the Pentagon is a hapless hack who is advocating for Critical Racism Theory (CRT) even though he is not familiar with it. Is it possible that he did not expect to get the question or be asked about it-since he had already opined that it was important to teach subjects like CRT since West Point is a college-so why wouldn’t the Point teach Marxist inspired classes that talk about how America was founded on racism and white supremacy at inception and that it exists to this day-being a systemic problem that stems from the fact that people are white: so not a learned behavior or trait, but something one is born with—that’s what he is going with? Never mind those immigrants to this country, or those who weren’t slaves, never owned slaves and have been color blind for going on nearly half a century at this point!
And that is one of the most maddening aspects about Racism theory-the undoing by moving the goalpost now that it has been achieved of Martin Luther King’s dream of a colorless or colorblind America where people are judged by the content of their character in favor of a nation and a segment of the population that advocates to be recognized for their color as if it imbues some significant human trait or attribute that needs to be highlighted over others.
These are but a few of the issues crushing active-duty morale and sending big old red flag signals to the population at large-but particularly parents of military age children-that contribute to recruiting problems.
I went long here but part 2 will return to a focus on Austin and his qualifications to resign.
Max Dribbler
30 June 2022
LSMBTG: Lamestream media echo chamber (LMEC-L) social media (SM) big tech tyrants (BT) and government (G)
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: AFNN_USA
1 thought on “Secretary of Defense Austin Reinforces His Qualifications to Resign”