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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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No differently than before, if the numbers are anything to go by; I see no dropoff in the slightest after 2011. Are the numbers wrong, or are you?

Your numbers lacks serious range, stopping around 2011 for some reason. I still can easily see a visual steep decline starting when “don’t ask don’t tell” was implemented, which actually helps prove my point.

https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/addressing-the-u-s-military-recruiting-crisis/

How bad is the recruiting crisis? During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target. This shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000. And the current fiscal year is likely to be even worse. Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000. That means that the nation’s primary land force could plummet by as much as 7 percent in only two years — at a time when its missions are increasing in Europe and even in the Pacific, where the Army provides many of the critical wartime theater enablers without which the other services cannot function.

Try looking at actual numbers, not just the first graphic from a web search. Active duty numbers are published yearly and it's public information, and if you're not poor statista will compile that into more parse-able charts. There is a noticeable drop from a local peak in 2010 to 2016 but that has halfway recovered since. Keeping in mind that in raw numbers it's a drop on the order of 100,000 members, with a recovery on the order of 40,000 and that in per capita terms that is a continuing decline.

One hundred thousand fewer people on active duty, in an army of over a million, the cause of which the statistics (obviously) won't tell us.

If that's it, I'm going to keep filing this under the non-issue drawer, yeah.

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