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John Carter: The Bud Light Military
(Or, to use the better title from the comments: "Achilles Shrugged")
I'm not familiar with the author, who seems to be yet another online right substackker. He asserts that America's military capabilities are being stretched increasingly thin (Ukraine, possibly Israel, potentially Taiwan) while the armed forces are missing their recruiting targets. This is the background to his main claim: that the core demographics of America's fighting force ("the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks") have become so sick of the sneering racist abuse that they aren't signing up to fight any more, and while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers. Carter compares a previous ad for the US Army ("Emma", the girl with two moms who operates Patriot missile defense systems, roundly mocked at the time by comparisons to a Russian recruiting ad) to the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube). Carter parallels it with the attempt at brand rehabilitation like the one Bud Light tried after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, and if the comment sections of Twitter, YouTube, and his article are anything to go by, it's not going to work either.
Failed to bring back the volunteers…in 5 days?
Does it not seem more likely that the US is at full employment and military pay is dogshit? Junior enlisted soldiers in the army are paid, it seems, less than $25,000 a year. There may be additional pay for various things, but given a young man (even with only a high school education) can make double that in some low skill jobs or triple (or quadruple) that in the trades, why would anyone become a soldier? In 2009 when there were no jobs anything was better than nothing. Today, blue collar work is in an extraordinary boom.
It’s interesting that many pieces note the last time there was such a big recruitment shortage in the military was in 1999. What else was the case in 1999? A booming US economy and a thirty year low in the unemployment rate. This seems like antiwoke opinion writers projecting their politics onto the more mundane material considerations that more likely affect military recruitment.
This is definitely a big component. I'm from a key recruiting demographic area (southern borderer whites and similar culture blacks, not a lot of jobs around) and over the 2000s and into the early 2010s a huge portion of the young men enlisted. Due to the massive amount of civilian contractor work available for people with a security clearance, bad job market, and lowered standards for the troop surge everybody and their dog enlisted.
It started seriously reducing in the early-mid 2010s, at first with the fracking boom when sitting in a company truck or hauling pipes in Texas or the Dakotas would make triple or quadruple in a season what a soldier makes in a year. Also there was a glut of 11B infantrymen coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with no real job skills stuck working as mall cops, bouncers and corrections officers and telling all their younger siblings to do something else for a career.
Most subsequent cohorts of 18 y/os are going for learning a trade like pipefitting or electrical work and following plant shutdowns and startups around the country, doing a couple months insanely intensive work then just hanging out for a few months, on and off. Same story for seasonal tourist work waiting tables and guiding rich people that want to LARP as outdoorsmen in Alaska and Colorado.
If you're not planning to go to college anyway and think you're probably dying in your sixties, it's much more attractive to go with the higher paying job where you have some level of choice in where you work and what you do versus being Uncle Sam's bitch for years and getting paid peanuts at that.
I think the "troop surge" also did some damage. It was like a lite version of "McNamara's Morons" and all the meth tweakers, biker gang members, serial DUI offenders and Jerry Springer guest stars wandering around loudly crowing about their military status and still being general fuckups in life afterwards made it seem like less of a guarantee of a successful career than local civilian jobs, and did a real number on the amount of automatic respect one would get for having been in the military.
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I have never known anyone to join the military because of pay. If anything, the military for many when I was younger was a way to receive training in some of the blue collar trades they would later join on discharge. Then of course some just joined to kick ass in Iraq (I was 21 when the Gulf War occurred.)
I was born and raised in the South fwiw, and though my own family also had its share of military service going back generations, I was, in my youth, much more a pacifist. I still did Peace Corps because you didn't just age up without serving your country in some way, or that was the thinking (and PC was in some way "serving" albeit that may have been my rationalization.)
Of course, times may have changed.
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