By Andrea Widburg, American Thinker
If you act quickly, you can enter the joint Modern War Institute and US Army Training and Doctrine Command writing contest.
The contest wants ideas to solve the military’s recruiting problems.
If you can offer a winning solution in no more than 1,500 words, along with abiding with other stylistic guidelines, you’ll get public recognition, and maybe the powers that be will act on what you have to say. The deadline for submissions is at 11:50 p.m. Eastern Time, on September 3.
In a post announcing the contest, the Modern War Institute, which operates at West Point, explains the problem:
“Credible defense begins with our ability to steadily attract and retain the men and women who would assume the initial burden of a fast breaking war.” More than forty years ago, Vice Admiral Robert B. Pirie, Jr. eloquently described why recruiting was a national security issue.
This year, the Army will again fail to meet recruiting goals after falling fifteen thousand short last year. Likewise, the Navy anticipates falling six thousand sailors short of its target. The Air Force has issues too, with Secretary Frank Kendall acknowledging in March that his service would fall 10 percent short this year. Except for the two smallest services—the Marine Corps and Space Force—the United States’ armed forces continue to face recruiting woes.
Do you find it as distressing as I do that the brightest minds within the military can’t seem to figure this one out on their own?
It seems to me that the solutions are obvious:
#1
Get rid of social justice concerns about race.
Our military works superbly when it’s a colorblind institution in which everyone bleeds red, white, and blue. And because it’s a life-or-death institution by its very nature, merit must be the primary focus for responsibility and advancement.
Nobody wants to enlist in the military (or encourage a child to enlist) knowing that merit is a low-level consideration. That kind of thinking kills people.
#2
Go back to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which was a reasonable compromise.
Those people most likely to go into the military are straight males. More than that, they’re straight Christian males. They have no interest in serving in an institution that makes a fetish of homosexuality. After all, being honest means acknowledging that homosexuality makes straight men uncomfortable.
The focus on homosexuality also challenges core religious beliefs. After all, the Bible’s first chapter has God create a gender binary of complementary sexes, and the Bible’s moral teachings are about the male-female nuclear family.
Offend those teachings, and you offend those potential enlistees. I’m also willing to bet that homosexual relationships (the loving and the fighting) are damaging to unit cohesion.
#3
Get rid of “transgenderism” in the military.
Either so-called transgender people are mentally ill with a form of body dysphoria, which means they have no place in the military, or they are sexually perverse autogynephiles who are sexually aroused by their own presentation as someone of the opposite sex, which means that they have even less place in the military. Get rid of the crazy and creepy people, and you’ll get lots more normal people knocking on the door.
#4
Remove climate change as a military consideration.
The military’s job is not to defend against climate change. It’s to defend America by defeating foreign enemies.
Our troops and the American people deserve the best weapons and transportation systems regardless of their effect on the climate.
I’d say that even if I gave the slightest credence to climate change madness. I definitely say it given that the whole anthropogenic climate change theory is hogwash, intended to destroy Western economic dominance and transfer wealth and military power to the third world and China.
No sane person should enlist in a military that’s essentially fighting human existence.
#5
Get women out of combat units.
Women have fought in combat units over the millennia, but they’ve done so only when the war has landed on their doorstep, creating a “fight or die” situation. Otherwise, women, who are physically weaker, have no business in a combat unit.
More than that, at the most fundamental level, women should be life-givers, not life-takers. The men in a mixed-sex unit instinctively understand that, and it impairs their fighting efficiency if they’re trying to defend their female comrades rather than focus on destroying the enemy.
I also suspect that heterosexual relationships damage unit cohesion.
#6
Every person in the military needs to be reminded daily that the military does not exist to make people feel good about themselves.
It exists to defend America. Anything that weakens that primary function (race over merit, efforts at impossible-to-achieve gender parity, sexual obsessions, climate change nonsense) means that the military is failing in its duty.
Those in the Pentagon who back this failure should be summarily discharged, and some should be court-martialed.
One more thing, although it’s not something the military can do: If the American people would get rid of presidents and Deep Staters who believe that the military’s job is to protect other countries rather than America (that is, abandon the Wilson Doctrine), that would go a long way to making the military a more enticing institution.
Fundamentally, if the military is returned to a sensible organization that focuses on keeping its troops alive and making its enemies dead, recruitment should be fine.
First published in American Thinker
ESSAY CONTEST CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: SOLVING THE MILITARY RECRUITING CRISIS (Modern War Institute, 19 July 23)
Essays must answer the following prompt: What novel approaches can the United States military employ to solve the recruiting crisis? . . . . .
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