Largest and most highly funded military in the world defeated by blue hair baristas and the pajama boy brigade
What’s pyjama boy brigade, it sounds comfy cute
Mr. Obama sir, I think you’ll appreciate this: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/413079861922508800
Oh I remember this. Asked the
for a stack of photos of cute men in pyjamas, ON MY DESK BEFORE 12 
(and then I needed to think of a way to use them to avoid suspicion)
Looks like a walrus waiting expectantly for the handler to throw a fish in.
Me with chronic depression sitting at the computer in sweats and an old T-shirt for 3 days straight.
While we’re on the subject of vets, I hate how homelessness always gets tied up with veterans. Like it’s socially acceptable to advocate for homeless veterans because “they gave their all” but your average homeless person is just SOL because fuck you get a job.
Don’t worry. It’s just nominal advocacy. They get thrown to the wolves like every other homeless person. They just get the benefit of having politicians shed a tear for a few seconds
They’re a useful example to use when convincing reactionaries to support more support for the homeless in general. Just be like, “Don’t you care about the homeless veterans?” to get them to support a universal policy.
Service guarantees citizenship
Liberals: “in order to maintain American hegemony, raw resources, and global capitalism, we must encourage the diverse American population to kill for us by showing that they are nominally accepted and part of our society.”
Conservatives: “NOOO!!! THE WEST HAS FALLEN!!! ALL THE SOLDIERS HAVE TURNED TO SAILORS!!”
One of the reasons why you want a diverse workplace is actually because it diversifies your recruitment pool and connects you with more and better applicants. So in fact, a general saying that the military is too white is just him being practical about one of the things limiting recruitment.
In other words facts don’t care about your feelings.
That’s the stupid thing though, it’s not even about overall diversity, military has that already, it’s about diversity in the leadership. Which means fuck all to some random high school dropout from West Bumblefuck considering recruitment who’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of moving that far up the ladder regardless.
AFAIK officer recruitment and promotion and enlisted recruitment and promotion are done totally differently. The enlisted system is actually pretty good on this point, since you either get promoted on a point system that heavily considers seniority or get promoted by a panel of higher ups who only see an anonymous resume, but the officer one requires a lot of “office politics” since the people promoting you know you personally so stuff like racial discrimination is baked in no matter how many “equal opportunity” briefings they make you sit through.
The same office politics control both. It’s even almost literally the same form. The difference being, enlisted advancement is done through tests and combining that with an evaluation score (where the office politics comes in, and if you don’t have the highest eval you aren’t getting enough points) that combines with points from awards, education, and other shit (and office politics determine who gets those awards, who goes to the extra schools, etc). Then anybody that’s above a certain point value for their job group makes the next rank. There’s a set number of billets and they chop the top scoring off to fill them.
Once enlisted hit the beginning of their “senior leadership” level promotions the form stays, but the tests go away and instead you have a board that you report to that gives an oral exam of sorts and then they all weigh in together and look over your packet and they have to majority agree. At this level you’re basically applying for specific billets and the rank promotion comes with that billet, so it’s like a job interview and all of the office politics that go into that combined with a permanent record of your military career that would make a high schools permanent record blush. You see where the good old boys club comes in here.
Officers are promoted solely through spending enough time at the lower ranks (no tests ever for the failsons, just show up on time buddy) and once they reach senior leadership levels they follow the same process as senior enlisted promotions except their board is mostly made up of the highest senior enlisted at the command and a couple officers. Same good old boys club, because it’s entirely dependent on the board and office politics who makes that promotion/gets that posting.
Whole thing is designed to insulate senior leadership and officers from consequences and discomfort while offloading the work onto an increasingly shrinking body of lower enlisted who increasingly aren’t giving a shit about doing things the right way with a leadership that has all but mentally checked out in light of increased struggles that don’t seem to have any coherent grasp of or plan for addressing.
Another unaddressed problem: being in an age where everyone knows the government and media lied to get an illegal war and then nothing happened to the liars who orchestrated it all. Hard to remain a gung-ho idealist.
Uncritical support for wokeness
I don’t this is an either/or situation. You have listed very legitimate issues that have had a negative impact on recruitment.
But the hippies
I don’t care what’s killing it, I’m just glad it’s happening. We can sit around and talk for hours. It’s a huge combination of things that starts and ends with a “for profit” motive being the worst fucking thing possible to structure your military around.
It certainly isn’t due to “woke” ideology, but I find it very funny that even my lib friends have noticed that the empires military ain’t doing so hot.
It won’t stay that way for long. Eventually they’ll institute mandatory service to keep their defense contracts pumping out money.
It’s completely disconnected in that way though. Take for instance the Gerald Ford, the newest class aircraft carrier.
Through organic cuts, not a predetermined plan, manning has been reduced to an all time low; 2380 when it was projected to have 2716.
“Most of the cuts appear to be organic, occurring while the USS Ford was on an active deployment, as the carrier operates on the fringes of a major conflict.” These are sailors that are leaving the boat, to another command or out of the Navy entirely and just not being replaced. The issue with using a draft to replenish those numbers is that our equipment isn’t designed to be quickly and intuitively learned and operated. It’s designed to need outside training and repair from people employed by these defense contractors.
Much like McDonalds realized they could shed expensive crew and still operate at profit, the Navy has learned the same lesson. “The Navy desperately wants to position the Ford carrier program for success, and, given that the extended deployment will delay key, high-profile testing events, shedding crew offers an immediate boost to the platform’s lifetime operational and maintenance savings, making the platform’s ragged business case far more viable.”
“But, rather than break down, the carrier is breaking performance records. In fact, the ship recently spent ten weeks away from port, in what appears to be the vessel’s longest uninterrupted period at sea since it was launched.”
Despite the crunch in crew, the gears are still turning, and neoliberalism is famously reactive instead of proactive. Since the war machine on paper appears as good as ever, these cracks will keep being bandaged over until there’s a sudden massive failure as the ripped apart seams can’t be held together any longer. A draft isn’t near enough to fix what is rotten here.
Ten weeks away from port, sailing around like a leisure cruise. No active war, no active threats.
It’ll sink the moment there’s a real conflict with a peer nation
That’s how you bring back fragging
Wokeness will finally defeat the Great Satan when Ayatollah Seyyid Khameini colours his hair and gets a septum piercing.
I hate how they get to sit there and act like shit that transparently didn’t happen happened and everyone just accepts it as fact after a while
I can’t believe they made me love wokeness even more
Im still on the america is too unhealthy and uneducated to even do what the military asks and also military bloat with no slow down warps perspective
woke ideology take my energy
