Nobody In The Military Can Explain Just Why Recruiting Is So Hard These Days

Mystery has the military-industrial-intelligence complex stumped

Lt. Col. Bree Fram of the Space Force deigned to visit earth last October to deliver a pronouncement from Mount Media Sinai that “inclusion” has to be a national security priority.

At an event titled The Most Powerful Women Summit, hosted by Fortune, Fram, an astronautical engineer, said that coming to work as his “full self” allows him to “bring the value of diversity” to Pentagon acquisitions policy.

Bree Fram is a man. I will use only clear language here. Either he has autogynephilia (AGP), an increasingly common condition in porn-saturated adult males — especially men in professions associated with ‘toxic masculinity,’ such as military service — or else Fram is what people used to call a “transvestite.”

So when Fram says the word “diversity,” he refers to his political category, a relatively recent verbal construction that enjoys extraordinary deference, from the top down, by way of the chains of command.

Military accountability has been weaponized against the ‘toxic male.’ Don’t use the wrong pronoun, soldier, or you’re on report. Obey the orders to call him a her or you will receive an Article 15. Oh, and we still don’t have a new set of physical training standards to replace the reality-based, “gendered standards.” We cannot ask the Colonel Frams of the new military to take the “wrong” PT test for their “gender,” can we? This is why we no longer have fitness standards.

Incidentally, we are also adopting the DEI approach to promotion scoring, since we cannot use PT scores anymore. Why are retention and recruitment down? We have no idea. Stop asking those kinds of questions, or you might get in trouble.

Fram will also refer to this new category of human, to which he claims to belong, as ‘marginalized.’

Our American military is very busy “stamping out extremism.” That unreachable goal is “a top priority ever since the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol” because so many defendants were military veterans supporting Donald Trump. This is the actual reasoning.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has announced that “a new report … conducted by the Institute for Defense Analysis” has called for “a comprehensive change” in the culture of the military “to both better identify current extremists and to prevent troops and Department of Defense (DoD) civilian employees from becoming radicalized.” Not that there is any sign of this problem looming in reality.

The good news is there is "no evidence" that violent extremism is "disproportionate" in the military compared to the wider American population, according to the report.

But the report notes that even a small number of violent extremists in the ranks "could present a risk to the military and to the country as a whole."

We must destroy the military culture in order to save it. Conveniently for the Col. Frams wearing American uniforms, “the report states there is no clear, DOD-wide definition for what constitutes extremist ideology or activity.” A future General Fram can just make it up as he goes.

“Until these policies are appropriately updated, they are likely to contribute to continued confusion over the scope of prohibited activities.”

Fram can solve that problem. The new Harry Potter video game is banned on base! All memos referring to “pregnant soldiers” will use gender-neutral pronouns on pain of dismissal! And so on.

We need this eternal struggle session, otherwise the terrorists win.

Military recruiters are simply unable to interest young Americans in the uniform, anymore, for some reason that no one can quite explain. Justin Overbaugh looks at the US Army and pins primary blame for the recruiting shortfall on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, or rather the way politicians of both parties “set up” the Army for failure.

It was asked to accomplish objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq that it could not possibly hope to achieve. Professors Leo Blanken and Jason Lapore point out what every senior defense official should clearly understand by now: that despite its impressive capabilities, the U.S. military is of limited utility in the type of non-existential conflicts we have fought in the past two decades. This is because the U.S. military is built for and excels at “battlefield dominance,” yet it was saddled with conducting counterinsurgency, reconstruction and building democratic institutions, tasks it was not trained for or prepared to accomplish.

[…T]op defense officials assured the American public that the U.S. military was “making progress” towards its goals, right up to the point that it was manifestly evident that they were not. And yet, at precisely the moment the American public is looking for accountability, many of the same senior officials who failed to achieve results for the nation, are instead rewarded with lucrative positions in the defense industry and with foreign countries.

Unmoored from realistic strategic purposes, the United States armed forces could not win in Afghanistan. The more disturbing point, however, is that in that same time, the services became far more political in order to please their paymasters in Congress. What used to be called “political correctness” has graduated up the ranks to become the tyranny of “inclusion.”

Even the people who write and talk about this stuff all the time can underappreciate just how bad things are.

In his “Diversity Thursday” feature last week, the indefatigable opponent of DEI known as “Cdr. Salamander” took note of the phrase “affinity group” in Pentagon policy documents. He sees a trend “where at one point most organizations were more than proud to list their ‘affinity groups,’ and you could easily find each organization’s approved list on their DEI websites,” but now the phrase has disappeared from more recent policy prescriptions.

“I’ll take it as a good sign it is getting harder and harder to find them actually named,” he concludes.

Maybe. I spent some years committing acts of journalism in radical activist circles. "Affinity groups” are the basic building block of radical action. For example, in 2010 I videotaped a war protest in a snowstorm outside the White House. Daniel Ellsberg and Chris Hedges were there; I met groups of young war veterans, grizzled Vietnam veterans, libertarian Adbusters types, and a crew of artsy academic "faceless victims" that wore masks. These were all affinity groups.

The year after that, Occupy “general assemblies” had Infowars cliques, LaRouchies, Food Not Bombs, and so on, all making the problem of consensus as interesting as they could. Put me in a room with 100 “progressives” and I can start breaking down the factions present.

So it's actually worse than Cdr. Salamander imagines. Those “affinity groups” are now informal building blocks of the radicalized Pentagon bureaucracy. Only time and professional pressure could ever root them out.

This is not your forefathers’ military. Forget the Code of Conduct. Forget resiliency. Bree Fram is a living avatar of the new military ethos in which “vulnerability” is considered a good thing.

Fram highlighted the Guardian Spirits document which guides Space Force, saying it is what the military agency believes in. "It has words you wouldn't expect to see in a military leadership document," Fram said.

"It talks about embracing diversity and engaging inclusively. It talks about the value of openness, authenticity, and vulnerability. I mean vulnerability? In a military leadership document? That's wild to think of. Because vulnerability, the ability to show ourselves that we're human is that opening to connection, and embracing that connection with our teams makes us all better," Fram said.

Military life used to toughen people up. This sounds more like one of the more boring episodes of Star Trek: Discovery in which everyone stands around discussing their feelings instead of moving the plot forward.

This sounds like bullsh*t. Military service is being turned into a bullsh*t job.

A rising generation has no greater challenge than identifying their unique and special gender identities. Given too many participation trophies, too many rides to school, and pocket-sized screens as electronic babysitters, modern youth demand to feel good about themselves. They cannot handle any challenge that has not been nerfed for their comfort and safety. A mere pronoun makes them fall apart.

The new military life is designed for people who are fragile, not resilient. We don’t want or need the toxic young men to fight for us. After all, they are too “extreme,” and will probably just vote for the wrong candidate after, anyway.

So why are retention and recruitment down? Everybody knows, of course, but no one is allowed to say. It is a 21st century Catch-22. Speak the name of the problem and you will only become a problem for the system to solve.