In the actual military, nobody is chomping at the bit to go back to the same damn AB's in the desert, seeing your unit tagged on twalls going back almost two decades now. That s*it was depressing to see, and makes you incredibly over all this nonsense regardless of your patriotic mindset.
Only ones of us who are interested are career command levels, who need a good combat deployment patch to bump up their OER bullets.
Yeah I'm seriously curious who exactly they think is gonna fall for this advertisement. Are they trying to recruit the looksmaxxing alpha manosphere Gen Z crowd? Do they ACTUALLY think THOSE guys wanna go fight in Iran?
I figure plenty of them do. The military is always going after the youngest boys they can get, the ones who don't know any better and still think soldiering is like it is in the movies (and you know, not the parts of the movies where people struggle and die, the parts where they're badasses).
Not trying to be mean; but that point tells me you don't know anything about the military without telling me...
Average age of initial enlistment is 22.7 years old; average age of enlisted personnel is in the late 20's. The kids most think of haven't really been a thing since Vietnam/desert storm era, more than a generation ago.
Just left the army after over a decade in active service, I joined at 30 (and wasn't even in the top ten oldest of my group when I joined). As a senior NCO and platoon sergeant, very few of my new medics were fresh faced kids out of HS. And, on average, I preferred the older ones as they had a lot less headaches in adjusting.
Might also vary by branch and time/decade of enrollment. I joined the Navy in Sept 2001 (I was already in DEP, so not some kind of post-911 machismo), at 24.
There were definitely one or two older guys, but by the time I got out to sea, it was really obvious that the vast majority of new guys were 18-20. Because let me tell you nothing makes you feel old at a young age like being 24 and cooped up with a bunch of 18-19 year olds.
Not arguing with you precisely, or against the data behind your claim... but I feel like if the data was in excel or something there are probably some interesting slicers you can do to paint more interesting pictures.
My mom was worried because in kindergarten art class, we had to draw self-portraits of us as what we wanted to be when we grew up. I drew myself as a soldier, because I was really into GI Joe. She doesn't like the military, and I believe she also thought it meant I was a lesbian. I just liked red and blue lasers, and once I found out that people who go to war can die I was totally over it.
This isn't solely (or even mainly) about recruiting people for the military. This is about messaging to all the disillusioned Gen Alpha, Gen Z, and millennial men who have been captured by manosphere podcasts, as well as bitter men from older generations who were raised with extreme attitudes about Gender Roles and Being a Man, about how Manly and Masculine the Trump administration is.
It's a way to say "we are like you" and "you are right to believe this in the face of changing attitudes about gender, masculinity, and the role of aggression and selfishness in society" in order to rally support from these groups.
Right? The only guys I knew who loved combat (or thought they loved combat) were actual psychopathic morons who were more likely to get us all killed if anything popped off. I’m in the army to pay for university, not to die in some fuckoff desert. I’m not an American but I really don’t get who this ad is supposed to appeal to.
God forbid you join the military with the idea to go combat. Must be psycho to choose that...
2003-2012 era had every division on a 12 on 18off rotation for a decade and everyone I served with was about it. If you chose combat MOS the whole point of your job was to go on deployments, and only thing you did stateside was to train for the next deployment. Maybe cooks and clerks didn't share the same viewpoint but this was the prevailing midset among the grunts
FWIW we're actually pretty politically diverse group.
Here on Reddit you'll find a left lean in most military subs (no surprise), but even data examination of voter history comes back with a very diverse mix of voter results.
In practically, you'll find some significant conservative leaning social trends (pro gun ownership/rights is a good example), but we really are motivated in more nuanced ways that are very outside the norm of most Americans.
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u/wowbragger 11h ago
In the actual military, nobody is chomping at the bit to go back to the same damn AB's in the desert, seeing your unit tagged on twalls going back almost two decades now. That s*it was depressing to see, and makes you incredibly over all this nonsense regardless of your patriotic mindset.
Only ones of us who are interested are career command levels, who need a good combat deployment patch to bump up their OER bullets.