The US military has been having meeting enlistment quotas these past few years. The government’s response to the virus scare deserves its share of the blame. So do rising obesity rates among fighting age Americans. But browse a few of the news pieces lamenting low recruitment, and you’ll notice that they all take care to talk around the elephant in the room.
It’s no leap of logic to point out that a volunteer military relies on a healthy store of patriotism to drive recruitment. That’s why the US military has long relied on the South as a recruitment pool. Southerners have a venerable military tradition at least dating back to their Cavalier roots. It makes sense that they’d be overrepresented in the armed forces.
But to the military’s dismay, that wellspring of patriotism has limits. It turns out that manipulating people by their virtues ends up eroding the foundation of those virtues. Hence the steady decline in American pride over the past two decades.
Note that pride in being American peaked soon after 9-11 and dropped off when the Global War on Terror devolved into a generational forever war. The lesson our cosmopolitan rulers should have learned is that patriotism is stoked by threats to the ashes of one’s fathers and the altars of one’s gods. It wilts when a people realize they’ve been had by cynical transnational conmen.
Of course, our rulers aren’t known for their originality; just their persistence. Some of them noticed that the original Top Gun boosted enlistment fivefold. It should come as no surprise that the military has similar hopes for the hit sequel.
Or perhaps they did more than just hope.
Meet Top Gun: Maverick producer David Ellison.
He’s the son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle.
What’s the significance of Oracle? Not only has the company been a CIA contractor from day one; it started as a CIA project, and its name is taken from the operation’s codename.
Here’s a blast from the past story, ca. the time American patriotism was cratering, wherein ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft was involved in high-stakes courtroom shenanigans with Oracle.
“Sure, ” you might be saying, “Oracle glows in the dark. But do they have any military interests?”
Oh, boy. Do they ever!
Skimming Oracle’s web site turns up that they supply cloud storage to the Defense Department. Here they are crowing about landing a billion-dollar Air Force contract.
The Air Force, by the way, produced a slick ad to be played before showings of Top Gun: Maverick.
The Empire’s business is war. And Oracle, their Hollywood hired guns, and the state know what’s good for business.
For military adventure stories that are sheer entertainment, not propaganda, check out my hit mech saga.
I don’t think it’s just fatigue from the Forever War that’s killing patriotic fervor. As you keep saying – don’t give money to people who hate you. Corollary: don’t give your lives for them, either. Why fight for a country that tells you you’re racist, sexist, transphobic, etc. etc.?
Ask not what your country can do for you, perhaps; but that’s not even the question anymore. Now it’s: what has your country done TO you?
These recruiting problems are just one facet amongst others that all align in the direction that America is not well situated for WWIII:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/why-america-cant-win-world-war-iii
You’ve cautioned us against ascribing rational motives to the folks who are running things right now, so I won’t. Who knows if any of them believed all the things they said about angry white men, domestic terrorism, white supremacy, institutional racism, or any of the rest of it. Even if it was all just ritual cant, the folks whose fathers, grandfathers, and so forth, have served under a field of stars (in one configuration or another) haven’t had much reason to doubt their sincerity. They do give every indication of hating us. They told us we’re not wanted, not good enough, and that everything that’s going wrong is all our fault. They took a knee while Buy Large Mansions reveled in iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae.
While the civilians were doing that, the generals and admirals demonstrated to all the world they can’t steer ships or win wars. Why should anyone risk life and limb for leaders who can’t demonstrate competence, much less tell friend from foe? If they were trying to convince young, able-bodied Americans to reconsider their family traditions, or to transfer their loyalties back from the nation to their states, communities, or families, would they have done anything differently?
I noticed the other day that the latest Gallup poll shows institutional confidence is down across the board. That’s not a surprise, really, when it feels like society is coming part at the seems. The surprise to me is that confidence in the military is still as high as it is. It’s somewhere north of 60%, on average, but down significantly from last year, and more so among Republicans than Democrats. Confidence in the civilian institutions that control it, however, is in the toilet. Folks smart enough to be assets in military service know who gives the orders, so that might also explain their collective decision: “Don’t risk your life for people who hate you.”
Why do write in a style that is twice-redundant tautology? Oracle and Hollywood _are_ the state.
PS I didnt’ forget my noun / pronoun in the subject of the first sentence of that comment. I didn’t want to presume to know your second-person pronouns, so it was implicit. You / ye / thou / thee / y’all / y’ouse / y’ouse guys / etc etc etc and that’s only scratching the surface…