World War III has erupted. Europe is on fire. The body count is already shocking, but at least this
war hasn’t gone nuclear. Just like in World War II, the USA is at first reluctant to send its
boys over to the blood-stained expanses of the battlegrounds. But there’s another problem, the
Gen Zs of America just don’t want to fight. There aren’t that many people to send over to Europe.
What’s happened? Will this mean a draft for the young folks of the future?
It’s more possible than you think. We’ll come back to the draft soon.
First of all, let’s just say we hope we never get to see a scenario like this in our lifetime,
and we hope future generations won’t, either. World Wars, we expect, are a thing of the past.
When World War II was raging, the world was very different from what it is now. Not only
are governments much less willing to start or take part in great wars now, but young folks,
as we’ll show you today, are a different breed from the guys back in the 1930s and 40s.
Before we get into that, we’ll ask you this? How do you feel when you learn
about things such as the trench warfare of WW1? What’s your opinion of men in their
millions being ordered to go over the top to certain death just so a general far off can
move a few pieces on his battlefield map? The phrase lambs to the slaughter comes to mind.
How do you feel when you hear about the 70 to 85 million people that died in WW2? Something
like 27 million people died in the Soviet Union alone. Some Soviet battles starved civilians
so much that some people even resorted to cannibalism. How do you think you’d fare
in this kind of world? Or what about the war crimes, which were vast and terrifying? We know
so much about these things now. We’ve read the stories. We’ve seen the horror in the videos.
Yep, life aint what it used to be, and thank God for that. War isn’t appealing to many
people these days. We know too much about it. Even the most compelling propaganda wouldn’t
shift the average Gen Z guy or girl off the sofa to join a war started by politicians
they don’t like or trust. As George Orwell so presciently said in his dystopian novel, 1984,
the future generations of people won’t “be able to stomach” global wars like the ones in the past.
Orwell believed we’d have endless conflicts instead. He never used the words
military-industrial complex, but he alluded to that. He believed to keep the people controlled,
they’d need constant enemies, and then they’d sign up to support their leaders in spending
huge amounts of cash on war technologies, new weapons that Orwell said would be, well,
kinda like the ones we actually have today. Of course, nuclear weapons would be a big reason
the world wouldn’t join in a mass war, but it is also because people have just changed.
Orwell was probably right when he said new generations wouldn’t be able to stomach
bloodbaths like those folks of the past did. Today, war is brought to you by video, videos
can be live-streamed right as limbs are blown off and faces are mangled. It’s just all, too, real.
One of the main reasons so many people in the past were so willing to fight is that
they just didn’t know what they were getting into. Some held onto a romantic notion about
fighting for their country, but after they did, many came back mentally shattered. We think most
young people nowadays have a clear idea of how mentally and emotionally crippling it
can be to watch men die and take men’s lives. Also, are young men, who make up the brunt of
the military, now less masculine? Scientifically no, but in terms of how they feel, maybe. You’ve
likely seen all those memes which show a man from the past compared to a man of today.
Ok, so they are silly, not representative of reality, and possibly offensive to some
of you more sensitive souls, but do they point to some kind of truth?
In 2016, The Washington Post wrote a story headlined, “The stark difference between
millennial men and their dads.” It featured a YouGov poll titled “The decline of the Manly Man.”
It also featured academics saying social norms have changed and men are not the men they used to
be - not that this is always a bad thing. It just might be, though, when you are trying to recruit
guys to enlist in the military, which often means asking them to be prepared to kill people.
It would be hard to argue with the fact that fighting and bravery on the battlefield are
somewhat masculine traits. Is it more likely that men who’ve grown up playing army and rough-housing
with their pals are more likely to want to fight than men who’ve grown up saying that
kind of thing is for mindless apes? Maybe more modern men might prefer
shopping for fashion accessories, taking endless selfies of their fine bodies,
and dreaming of the day they’ll star on Broadway. Sure, we’re generalizing, but some academics are
saying that men’s view of what it means to be a man has changed a lot over the years.
So yes, it is hard now to attract young people to sign up because the world has changed so
much. If there was a world war, we doubt that many people would want to go and join it. This
is the reason the draft would have to come back. We’ll come back to this topic later.
The US easily has the largest military in the world. In March of 2022, the Biden-Harris
Administration submitted to Congress a proposed budget of $813.3 billion for 2023. For 2022,
the budget is around $750 billion. China was next with $237 billion. The UK, that mighty military
power of the past, was just $55.1 billion, although admittedly, after things kicked off
in Ukraine, the UK said it might double that. We’re not going to analyze budgets today,
we’re going to talk about people. You, in fact, or many of you.
Right now, the US has about 1,832,000 (0.5% of the population) as its total
military personnel. 1,390,000 are active, and 442,000 folks are reserves. The army has the
most personnel, followed by the Navy, the National Guard, and the Air Force.
Looking at more statistics, about 600,000 of the entire US military personnel are under 25. Over
285,000 people are aged from 26 to 30, and the numbers keep going down after that. About 105,000
personnel are over 41. As you’ll see, it’s starting to look like the older guys will have
to stay on longer than they’d initially planned. According to data from the Office of the
Undersecretary of Defense, most personnel earn a wage that puts them in a fairly decent earning
bracket. The U.S. Army's yearly average wage is $65,102 a year, although some reports say the
lowest pay in the army is only about $20,172. You might be able to convince someone to risk
their life and shoot absolute strangers for 65 grand, but you’d be hard-pushed
to convince a young person to do that for 20 grand, unless, they were very poor and
didn’t feel like they had many better options. That’s how things generally went in the past,
but we don’t live in the past. It would be harder now to recruit even the poorest of folks.
in 2018, the states with the most people who enlisted were California, Texas, Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina, and New York. But if we look at the percentage of the population
of enlisted recruits for that year, the states that had the most people signing
up were from South Carolina, Florida, Hawaii, Georgia, and Alabama. The least
represented states were Washington, DC, North Dakota, Massachusetts, Utah, and Rhode Island.
The top races in terms of numbers were white, black, and Asian, and then the data just says
“other.” A big change from the past is the number of women who serve. In 1972,
when the draft had just ended, women made up just 2 percent of the enlisted forces and 8 percent of
people in the officer corps. These days it’s about 16 percent and 19 percent, respectively.
As for people who are LGBTQ+, we can’t find the official data on that because there is
none. We just know that these days the US military no longer embraces the “Don’t ask,
don’t tell” policy. President Biden reversed Trump's transgender military ban, but in relation
to today’s show, we doubt that reversal will make any profound difference in recruitment numbers.
Maybe you’re now thinking those numbers sound pretty healthy, anyway. What’s the problem?
The problem is that fewer young people nowadays want any part of the military. They’re quite
happy to vicariously blow people’s heads off in games like “Brothers in Arms:
Road to Hill 30,” but spilling virtual blood is about as far as they want to take matters.
In 2022, the New York Times said as much. An article talked about the difficult time the
army was having trying to enlist new recruits. It is currently many thousands of young folks
short. The army just can’t find enough people to join up. These days all over the US, you
can hear a pin drop at Army recruiting stations, when not that long ago, they were busy places.
As Gen. Joseph Martin, the Army's vice chief of staff, recently said, “The talent
pool from which we recruit continues to shrink.” Now soldiers are having to leave the recruiting
stations and go to places such as strip malls and fast food restaurants to find people they might
convince that joining the army is the right move. These are desperate times. Don't be surprised if
the next time you’re at the movie theater, some guy taps on your back and tells you the
army is rewarding and character-building, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to ski.
The Times wrote about this recruitment issue, “It threatens to throw a wrench
into the military’s machinery, leaving critical jobs unfilled and some platoons
with too few people to function.” It’s serious. Right now, is the worst recruitment has been since
the all-volunteer force became a thing in 1973. This is not a good time for low numbers, either,
seeing as the US has just sent more troops – about 20,000 extra – over to Europe to reinforce NATO.
It was reported that the army has been the worst hit, only getting 68% of the new recruits it
needed. The Navy was only 8% down, but the Air Force was doing ok earlier this year. Top Gun
II probably helped. In fact, according to Maj. Gen. Edward Thomas Jr., commander of the Air
Force Recruiting Service, the movie did help! As we said in the first part of this show,
part of the problem the army and navy are facing is related to generational changes
in attitude. The military is not as enticing as it used to be, not for Gen Z, but there’s more
to empty recruiting stations than that. The unemployment rate matters. In 1933,
the US unemployment rate was a staggering 24.9%. That was very high. When it goes high,
the military generally has less of a hassle trying to find recruits. In 1944, the unemployment rate
was only 1.2%, but then many men were actually fighting in the war, and many people at home were
working in some way connected to the war effort. In 1982, the US unemployment rate was 10.8%,
which was relatively quite high, so the military may have been more enticing that
year for a lot of people. It was also quite high in 2010, 2011, and 2012, but in 2021,
it was just 3.9%. According to Statistica, it’s just 3.5% in 2022. This is super low.
So, that’s another reason fewer people seem to be going for a job with decent retirement
benefits and pays an average of $65,000 a year, or well above that if you stay in the military
long enough and try to excel there. The thing is, to many young Americans,
that’s not attractive enough, and neither is the fact that earlier in the year,
the army was saying it would give new recruits a bonus of $50,000 if they signed a six-year
contract. What’s wrong with these people? They will tell you nothing at all. They
just don’t want to join the army. It’s not their thing. The RAND Corporation said something that we
guess the military never expected. It said during the pandemic, a lot of young people worked from
home. They liked it. They now think much more about achieving a healthy work-life balance.
If a talented young person can earn enough to live on from writing computer code from 10 am
to 4 pm in their boxer shorts, will they really be up for doing one of the hardest jobs in the
world? A job whose small print in the contract might as well say, “P.S. You could lose a limb
and get deep fried like breaded chicken breast.” The pandemic mattered in other ways. People were
locked down for a while. People didn’t mingle as much. Going to the supermarket felt like entering
a war zone. Talking to a stranger felt like having unprotected sex. How do you think this affected
the military’s ability to talk to people? The answer is bad. Not many young people got buttered
up by the military over the last two years. There’s something else, too, and it’s a
huge issue. Here’s some data from the CDC: “From 1999 –2000 through 2017 –March 2020,
US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 41.9%. During the same time, the prevalence
of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.” The USA has one of the highest levels of obesity
in the world, especially if we are thinking about large, well-developed nations. It was bad in 2020,
but the obesity level in the US rose a further 3% over the first year of the pandemic. Who
would have thought that being imprisoned in your home, stressed out of your mind,
watching Netflix all day while stuffing your face with colorful snacks made of sugar and
saturated fat would be bad for your weight? Then there was the extra booze, and booze consumption
levels rocketed during the Great Fear. In 2019, USA Facts reported that the
obesity level in the US tripled over the last 50 years. Why does this matter, you might ask,
and accuse of fat-shaming? We’re not shaming anyone. We’re just telling you that being well
overweight makes it hard to get through military training and do things like finish those notorious
military obstacle courses, such as Private Pyle demonstrated in the movie Full Metal Jacket.
We didn’t see the rest of that movie. We do hope private Pyle came out of it ok.
But more than being unable to climb up a rope, obesity in young people can cause high blood
pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, joint issues, and breathing issues like asthma. In fact,
the CDC said that because of this obesity epidemic in the US, the military has fewer people to choose
from, and that negatively impacts national security. The USA is eating itself into losing
its next war. Folks are just too fat to fight. We aren’t kidding. This is what a
lieutenant general recently reported: “Just over 1 in 3 young adults aged 17-24
is too heavy to serve in our military.” “Among the young adults who meet weight
requirements, only 3 in 4 report physical activity levels that prepare
them for challenges in basic training.” It’s gotten so bad, says the US National
Institutes of Health, that various parts of the military have had to move the goalposts in terms
of BMI limits. You can now score worse in the weight-for-height tables and at least get your
fat foot in the door. You can now be pre-obese but not obese; let’s face it, being pre-obese is the
new normal in the land of the giants. It’s complicated, though. You might
have a high-ish BMI and still pass. A military veteran’s website told us this:
“An 18-year old male Army recruit who is 5’5 must weigh no more than 163 lbs. A 25-year old male
Army recruit who is the same height can weigh no more than 165, and a 30-year old male Army
recruit who is 5’5 can weigh no more than 168.” The website said the army is serious about health,
so if you turn up sucking on Marlboro Reds, stinking of the eight King Cobra 40s you had
last night, and looking like you grew up in a house made of lard and M&Ms, you probably
won’t even get past the first interview. Each military branch has different standards
regarding weight, but obviously, if you want to fly a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II,
you’ll have to fit in it and be able to eject out of it. You’ll have to do some
kind of fitness test, too, such as in the army, they want you to do two minutes of push-ups,
two minutes of sit-ups, and a two-mile timed run. It’s a point system, and you don’t have to be Mo
Farah to pass, but trundling around the course like a sloth late for a bus just won’t cut
it. For a very high score for the two-mile run, you need to do it in around 13 minutes,
which is really fast for a regular dude or dudess. Walking would take most people 30-45 minutes,
so obviously, the army wants you to be fairly fit. As we said, this counts out a huge chunk of
American youngsters out already, excuse the pun. Not only that, but the military doesn’t
want you if you have a disqualifying kind of crime on your criminal record. The New York
Times says these days that takes even more young people out of the picture for a life
in the military. The number of young folks with criminal records has been on the rise of late.
The Center for American Progress and Generation Progress wrote in 2022:
“Young people - those ages 18 to 35 - make up only 30 percent of the U.S. adult population,
yet they represent 60 percent of adult arrests and 42 percent of adult prison admissions.”
This is why the military has made some concessions lately to expand
the net of who can enlist. Neck tattoos are no longer an issue,
and the army announced in 2022 that people no longer need to have passed high school to join up.
So, you can now look like Lil Uzi Vert or 6ix9ine and also have their academic backgrounds,
but they’d both be counted out since, in more ways than one, they have rap sheets. Still,
if you look like some infant scrawled on your face while you were sleeping and you
have more Ds in your educational background than Dolly Parton has
written in her bra collection, you can still get into the military.
Nonetheless, according to the Pentagon’s latest data, 76 percent of people in the
US aged 17 to 24 wouldn’t be able to enlist even if they tried their hardest. This is
because they either have a criminal record, are too overweight, or have certain medical issues.
But even then, the military's biggest problem is what we outlined at the start of the show.
That is the attitude of young people. It’s now being reported that if you asked every
young adult in the US if they would even consider joining the military,
only 9% of those eligible to fight may do so. This is not just about them being able to stomach
it, as Orwell said, or that they’ve seen too much blood and guts from the reality of war,
but also because they have lost some trust in the U.S. government and its
military. We didn’t say that, the military did, or at least a recruiting general did.
With that in mind, will any of you youngsters out there ever be drafted into the military?
You probably think no way, but yes way, if Congress voted on it in the event of a
national emergency. You’d have no say in the matter. Who knows, if that happened,
some of you would happily put down your gaming pads and pick up a rifle. But we guess many of
you would watch the National Draft Lottery draw on TV in a state of petrified panic.
Now you need to watch “Insane Facts You Never Knew About the US Military.” Or,
have a look at “What if Russia Launched a Nuclear Bomb (Minute by Minute).”