October 5, 2022
The Military's Self-Destructing Perception Bubble
By Bob Brostoski
During my last few years in the military before I retired in 2020, it was common to hear that "the military-civilian divide is a problem that is getting worse." Whenever I heard this, it was always in the context that this divide was America's problem. "The American public doesn't understand the military," or "their kids aren't fit to properly support the military." There never seemed to be any reflection from the military. But the military has a serious problem with recruiting now. Based on the latest reports, the U.S. Army will achieve only 75% of its recruiting goal for 2022.
As a veteran, I follow many military news sources, and over the past two years, the theme has always been the same when it comes to the conversation on military recruiting. The military's messaging is off, it doesn't provide enough benefits, the job market is too competitive, or it hasn't found the right social media tools to reach the young generation. What's commonly left out of many of these articles is politics and a "woke" military. When and if discussed, in many of these articles, which are usually written by typical media elites or military people who can't see out of the bubble, this is dismissed.
While I'm sure there is some validity to these reasons, the military fails to see what probably will have the worst impact on military recruiting for years to come: the trust of the American people, and more specifically the trust of American parents. Despite the experts in the federal government, who seem to believe that kids can be raised by proper tech manipulation and enough free stuff from the government, parents still play an important role in their kids' lives in "flyover" country, and it's not unforeseeable for these parents, who have now categorized the military with every other government agency, to tell their kids, "You can go work at the local plant, or stay on the farm."
When questioned about many of today's controversial changes or policies in the military, top brass almost always fall back on the standard answer: "the military is only a reflection of the American people." It's here where the military is failing miserably and will probably continue to hemorrhage recruiting numbers for years to come. There was a time when the military was a pretty accurate representation of the American people, but that is no longer the case. The military, the most trusted and respected federal agency when I retired, is now in the ranks of the IRS and the FBI. Somehow, the military has managed to take a combat-trained force, which also happened to be the one of the most diverse and trusted organization in the country, and succeeded in ostracizing most of its supporters. While the military still believes that it is representing the whole country, it now seems to represent only a small group of leftists and elitists that not only hate the country, but also have historically despised the same military that is now killing itself trying to accommodate every social just crisis that hits Twitter or Facebook at any given moment.
To put this into the proper context, senior leaders in the military who led troops into battle are now threatening subordinate leaders over a social media platform, which is probably made up of thousands of fake robot accounts, which are then being influenced by China over a vaccine mandate that was derived by some of the same people influencing the social media accounts and supported by a guy who recently just admitted that his handling of the pandemic was wrong, who also is the source of the vaccine mandate that caused the turmoil in the first place. The sad thing with all of this is that I don't think these senior leaders realize that most of the people they need and want to support them for future recruits don't even have a Twitter account and are shaking their heads when they read about these things in the paper, or hear about them from a fellow veteran.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_militarys_selfdestructing_perception_bubble.html
