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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.
I did not enlist in the military when I was younger because I did not make the cut medically, even after carefully tailoring my statements to be not-exactly-lies as my recruiter instructed. As such, I have no firsthand information on this topic.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I do have some interesting secondhand information about this topic. I have quite a few friends and family who are active military, and every single one of them has told me that the higher-ups are pushing pretty much anyone who can string two words together into a sentence to move into recruiting. I have a few coworkers who did their time and got out who are receiving attractive offers to go back into the service, but specifically as recruiters.
While those facts could be coincidence, it does suggest there's a level of concern brewing in the upper ranks.
As @JTarrou mentioned below:
The gym where I lift has a pretty hard driving, ooh-rah, red-white-and-blue bloooded, America Fuck Yeah clientele. In the last three years, I've heard far more anti-government and anti-military sentiment than I had in the decade prior. A lot of it seems to stem from the fact that the COVID vaccine mandate, whether intentionally or not, was a de facto soft purge of that kind of person. I've heard the literal phrase "die for Israel" come out of more than one recent high-school graduate's mouth at as they hang around the squat rack.
This is anecdotal, but I spent the weekend with deep red tribe boomercons who just a few years ago would have been talking about the need to hit Iran before they can hit us- the sentiment was that the USA is fucked up and overextended with a government that’s increasingly telling lies to try to drag out their time before the music stops, foreign entanglements are mostly wrongheaded, and the government is as hostile to its own people as to anyone else. ‘Crimea is part of Russia but I don’t like Russia. Ukraine needs to admit they lost.’ ‘Israel is a wealthy country and should pay cash for their weapons.’ ‘The government and the media lie to us about race to cover up for the dysfunction in black culture, why should we take the blame for it? Without whites they’d be living in mud huts, or be someone else’s slaves.’ ‘The government is importing as many illegals as possible to make it look like economic growth so they can get away with running up a deficit.’
Just a few years ago it would be ‘the economy will get better, all this gay stuff’ll blow over, we need to hem Russia in on the world stage’. The red tribe disillusionment with the federal government is real, and since recruiting is mostly from the red tribe, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t affecting recruiting.
Sometimes the best way to reform bad rules is to rigorously enforce them. At some point they'll let someone who had the littlest bit of childhood asthma join. Or we'll never meet a recruiting goal again.
As someone who has mild ADHD himself, I can understand why you don't want them on the battlefield.
War is long periods of boredom interspersed by short periods of terror, and if it wasn't obvious, boredom or focusing on incredibly boring tasks like guard duty or keeping watch would be an issue for someone with ADHD.
Of course, that doesn't particularly matter since we have drugs for the problem, drugs that work pretty goddamn well, are quite cheap, and would be kept in stock anyway if only for high value people like fighter pilots who can't afford to be tired and jet-lagged. A hundred dollars or less than a kilo of Adderall added to the logistics burden, and your ADHD trooper is ready to go, and he might even sneak a few to his buddies, regardless of regulations, and likely improve their overall performance in the process. I don't think the US of all nations is in a position where that's an onerous requirement, not when during WW2 they had ships dedicated to refrigerating ice-cream.
I play a lot of milsim video games, which while certainly not a proper substitute for war, are slower paced and more methodical than most games. I can certainly tell the Ritalin makes me a better virtual soldier, and even for those with significantly worse ADHD, they're likely to perform to par if you dose them up enough.
It's certainly not a burden so terrible that you should be turning them away during a recruiting crisis!
Said soldiers now need access to the Ritalin. It's not a great analogy but think about shit like type 1 diabetes and insulin, or hell stuff like depression that's stable on SSRIs. Sure, we might have the logistics capability to keep ADHD troops supplied with Adderall for months and months, and the shit can be vacuum sealed or something to last for years. However it's something else that can go wrong in your war operation.
I'm not doubting that the US has the industrial capacity - puny as it is - and the logistics capacity to start making Adderall by the ton and shipping it to soldiers, however.
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It's actually even dumber than that, because the US overdiagnoses boys with ADHD at epidemic levels.
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