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Notes -
US military offers immigrants fast track to citizenship in effort to boost recruiting
I have some thoughts about this.
First, this looks suspiciously like textbook "How to lose your empire in five easy steps" guide:
Have your citizens grow fat, lazy and unwilling to risk their lives, especially in far away wars that they see no benefit from anyway
Hire strong and hungry barbarians to serve in the imperial military
Have the barbarians realize they are now doing most of the work holding up the empire together, while not getting commensurate benefits, which go to the fat and lazy citizens instead
Have the barbarians take over the reigns of power
The empire suffers bouts of "bad luck"
The historians write "Decline and fall of the $EMPIRE"
(Side note: since we live in the clown world, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that the word "barbarian" is used in purely descriptive, not pejorative, meaning - as "somebody who is not part of the imperial culture" - and, in fact, for the purposes of this definition, I am a barbarian myself and many of my friends are Barbarian-Americans)
Second, we have been actively sold the notion that DIE efforts in the military are vital if we want to keep the recruiting targets and the strength of the military. I do not see this idea being empirically confirmed, and what is even worse - I am not seeing anybody even interested in empirically confirming or disproving it. I expect that from the left - you don't seek an empirical confirmation of your religion, you already know it's the true faith. But I would expect people on the right - and I mean all those talking heads, think tanks and high-flying politicians - be interested in figuring out whether DIE actually makes the army stronger - and if not, pushing that fact hard. I don't think I am seeing this. For the most of the 20th century, The Right sleep-walked into giving up almost every major societal institution to The Left's takeover, but I'd expect at least they'd put up some fight for the military. Doesn't seem to be the case. Is it that the only thing that can get people really caring nowdays is when a piss water manufacturer offends them? I'd say the military going woke is a bigger deal than piss water going woke, but I don't see the red tribe treating it this way.
As a Hegelian synthesis of the above, the third thought is that the barbarians should be, at least at the start, the least woke part of the society. Thus, them joining the army in large numbers (provided that indeed happens) should constitute at least a temporary impediment to the further assimilation of the military into the woke collective. However, again, I see very little interest - at least where I could observe it, maybe I'm not looking in correct places? - in the red-tribe thought to exploring this opportunity and building some kind of "welcome wagon" track to ensure these people will join the Right Side and vote accordingly once they become citizens. I am not sure how it should look like, but that's what these "think tanks" are for, aren't they? Do the thinking thing and figure it out. Or at least try - I don't see the trying, really. Am I wrong here?
What empires were destroyed like that? I know you had Rome in mind, but Rome faltered when it closed the path to citizenship to the barbarians it hired. If the US settled several Ukrainian divisions in western Texas to guard the border or just paid the governor of Coahuila to protect the border from the other side, that would be closer to what Rome did.
While it is true that the US isn't using Kurds and Ukrainians to guard the imperial core, the dynamics are similar. The French and British empires had militaries full of colonials towards the end yet few of them were stationed in the UK itself.
War has historically been an elite endeavour. Knights were elite, samurai were elite, patricians fought in the first line in early Rome. WWII was the last war with a meaningful upper class representation in the US. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were low class wars. This represents a shift from the elites viewing themselves as stewards of an empire that are on a mission to build a divine empire to seeing the empire as a vehicle for their own personal benefit. This is a major symptom of the decline of the American elite and will show in other aspects of society.
By now, the working class is in poor health and too many think the elites are lizards or hate their leaders to fight. If Iraq happened today, it would be exceedingly difficult to find 150 000 men per deployment cycle. The US has 340 million people yet can't find enough soldiers, which is a massive failure. Military personnel per capita in the US is not high. The deep underlying issue is that few Americans want to serve. After 9/11 there were line-ups outside recruiting offices. If there was a repeat today, there probably wouldn't be.
The US military is recruiting foreign mercenaries. This brings a set of issues:
Mercenaries are there to get paid. They don't want to die, they aren't fundamentally motivated by the mission, and they want to do the minimum. Expect small level corruption, feet dragging, women getting pregnant in order to skip deployments, cowardess in battle etc.
The quality of large mercenary armies drop. Small groups of mercenaries motivated by a yearning for adventure can be high quality. In large numbers, mercenaries will mainly be people looking to get paid. They will get people who can't get a better gig. This means high wages combined with mediocre recruits.
A rift between the elite and what happens on the ground. A mercenary military is lower in skin in the game. People living on Manhattan and the troops fighting will have almost nothing in common. Expect a lower trust society with less cohesion.
Mercs have low loyalty. Expect more instances of enlisted leaking secrets on discord servers for personal clout, discipline problems, people selling secrets to foreign governments etc.
In England a hugely disproportionate number of senior officers are still from the upper class, having taken the Eton/Harrow to Sandhurst pipeline, the same way they have for 200 years or whatever. In fact in investment banking it’s very common to hire former officers who’ve taken that route and done their 5 years, many of my coworkers are in this category.
But it doesn’t seem to make a difference to the capability of the UK vs US military on a proportional basis. And American ‘elites’ or at least the PMC are well represented in the officer class still.
I can't verify the veracity of the claim, but apparently 163 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are Marines. Whether there's a formal pipeline for it or not, it appears that at least that generation had a substantial path for officers to power, success, and money.
There is indeed a robust but not quite formal military —> (possibly elite MBA) —> elite corporate/finance job pipeline. Military guys, typically former officers (but not always, and not always academy guys) are anecdotally very overrepresented in positions like this.
Despite a lot of rhetoric on sites like this, the actual elite who run things (and not the proverbial pink haired HR lady) like working with people who have demonstrated strong moral commitments, discipline, and the ability to show up on time and work hard.
Regardless of what the “actual elite who run things” prefer, HR pinkhairs are the gatekeepers when it comes to hiring. And while the “actual elite who run things” are preoccupied with running things, the pinkhairs have been busy slicing the salami behind their backs, increasingly prioritising characteristics that are orthogonal to—even negatively associated with—traits such as “discipline, and the ability to show up on time and work hard.”
Likewise, their counterparts in MBA admissions are doing the same.
The "actual elite who run things" know exactly what the pinkhairs are up to and are fine with it.
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But are they well represented in Arlington? What the gp meant was that the elite bled during wwi and ii. Quentin Roosevelt was not some unheard of exception
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