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Notes -
I did not enlist in the military when I was younger because I did not make the cut medically, even after carefully tailoring my statements to be not-exactly-lies as my recruiter instructed. As such, I have no firsthand information on this topic.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I do have some interesting secondhand information about this topic. I have quite a few friends and family who are active military, and every single one of them has told me that the higher-ups are pushing pretty much anyone who can string two words together into a sentence to move into recruiting. I have a few coworkers who did their time and got out who are receiving attractive offers to go back into the service, but specifically as recruiters.
While those facts could be coincidence, it does suggest there's a level of concern brewing in the upper ranks.
As @JTarrou mentioned below:
The gym where I lift has a pretty hard driving, ooh-rah, red-white-and-blue bloooded, America Fuck Yeah clientele. In the last three years, I've heard far more anti-government and anti-military sentiment than I had in the decade prior. A lot of it seems to stem from the fact that the COVID vaccine mandate, whether intentionally or not, was a de facto soft purge of that kind of person. I've heard the literal phrase "die for Israel" come out of more than one recent high-school graduate's mouth at as they hang around the squat rack.
This is anecdotal, but I spent the weekend with deep red tribe boomercons who just a few years ago would have been talking about the need to hit Iran before they can hit us- the sentiment was that the USA is fucked up and overextended with a government that’s increasingly telling lies to try to drag out their time before the music stops, foreign entanglements are mostly wrongheaded, and the government is as hostile to its own people as to anyone else. ‘Crimea is part of Russia but I don’t like Russia. Ukraine needs to admit they lost.’ ‘Israel is a wealthy country and should pay cash for their weapons.’ ‘The government and the media lie to us about race to cover up for the dysfunction in black culture, why should we take the blame for it? Without whites they’d be living in mud huts, or be someone else’s slaves.’ ‘The government is importing as many illegals as possible to make it look like economic growth so they can get away with running up a deficit.’
Just a few years ago it would be ‘the economy will get better, all this gay stuff’ll blow over, we need to hem Russia in on the world stage’. The red tribe disillusionment with the federal government is real, and since recruiting is mostly from the red tribe, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t affecting recruiting.
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Yep. They just hey-you-ed a bunch of people trying to fill recruiting ranks.
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