Deck division does that work, and also runs the majority of special ops (not specops like the seals, just non-regular stuff) at sea so you don’t want the dumbest guys to flood the division, though that’s quite common.
the difference hasn’t been significant so far for the low-scoring recruits brought in last year. Overall, 11.4% of those recruits didn’t finish boot camp, compared to less than 6.5% of the high-scoring sailors.
I was watching a documentary about US Navy boot camp, and was wondering if people who are headed for in-demand roles are given more help/slack than generalists? There was someone with a college degree who was going to intelligence, and I doubted they'd be dumped as easily as someone who just scraped their way in.
No, I was a nuke coming into the navy, the hardest to recruit supposedly, and I was treated perhaps worse for it, but definitely no better. Boot camp is the same for all.
You could have a cs degree working in cyber security and they still make you do the same bootcamp. If you get in through college programs you do the same playing soldier in the woods at your local base once a month thing too. If you join the marines the hazing/bs you put up with is certainly worse both in bootcamp and in terms of the routine monthly drill.
I can't speak specifically for the Navy, but as an Army officer I've been part of the pipeline that turns recruits into air traffic controllers, which is a pretty in-demand role. [I've also been part of the pipeline that turns college students into officers and pilots, but they don't go through "boot camp" in the same sense that enlisted members do.]
Your intuition is sort of correct, but sort of backwards. First, someone who qualifies for an in-demand role is less likely than most recruits to wash out because they are more qualified than the average recruit to begin with. Second, if someone fails along the way to becoming an air traffic controller or linguist or some other difficult job, there are a lot of other jobs that they can step down to and handle with ease. So we'd say, "Hey, you didn't make it, but this is a tough program so there's no shame in that, and here's another program that we can send you to do instead, if you want." On the other hand, if someone signs up to be a shower and laundry specialist (yes, that's a real job) and they fail in that program, we probably don't have much else that they'd qualify for, so they might be out of luck no matter how much they want to stay in uniform.
Edited to add: Of course, "boot camp" is "boot camp" for everyone, (mostly) regardless of the specialty that they signed up for. I'm mostly speaking above about the second stage of training.
These numbers are for enlisted recruits. To wash out of basic training/boot camp and be enlisted there has to be serious problems. Bed wetting, serious violence, egregious disciplinary problems or major integrity violations, Maybe being overweight or failing physical standards at the very beginning / end of training. With most of these things you just get rolled back and stay longer in training. The most common drops are early, often for integrity problems like lying to a recruiter about a criminal past or failing the initial drug test. After that if a person is kicked out of recruit training it's for the issues mentioned above and there doesn't seem to be any "fixing it"
These decisions are made by training commanders pretty much on a case by case basis, often with the armed service's needs in mind. Everyone who's at enlisted basic training is needed, because it's about volume.
I'll underscore this point. Basic training is not hard, and we really want people to pass. Like you said, if someone really wants to be there, we'll typically work with them for as long as necessary to get them through... second and third chances, for sure, with instructors practically holding their hand. Like I said in my other comment, if someone just couldn't handle tough academics, we found an easier job for them. When I actually separated people from the Army and sent them back to civilian life, it was usually a mutual decision.
I wonder if they have considered granting citizenship to non-citizen enlistees who go on to complete a standard 4 years of service (or whatever it is.)
You have to "be a lawful permanent resident at the time of your naturalization interview" [1]. (On the other hand, you're eligible if "you served honorably in the U.S. armed forces for at least one year at any time.")
Proposal is that anyone can enlist, e.g. at the border.
Flooding your military with people who have no conception of the values and history that underpin your society seems like a really bad idea to me.
I do like the idea of military service as a route to citizenship though. But literally just signing people up at the border seems way too problematic and dangerous.
> Flooding your military with people who have no conception of the values and history that underpin your society seems like a really bad idea to me
I agree. I assume we'd use foreign recruits to make up for domestic-recruiting shortfalls. The lack of knowledge of our history can be fixed with education; values, with selection criteria. I wouldn't be surprised if these immigrants turned out not only to be great fighters, but among the more patriotic Americans.
Alternatively bringing in a flood of foreign fighters who can be abused and extorted into doing dirty deeds by politicians holding an extremely lucrative carrot (US access) and stick (deportation) sounds like a recipe for abuse of the soldiers, and likely anyone they’re deployed against.
Considering the history of the French Foreign Legion, I’m disinclined to believe in the best possible outcome here.
> I do like the idea of military service as a route to citizenship though.
A lot of Filipinos went this route in 70s or 80s (hazy on timeline here). They enlisted abroad as well, although I guess it’s a different situation when another country has Us navy bases.
In Starship Troopers (the book), I'm pretty sure the ptoagonist (was it still Rico?) was Phillipino. Almost wonder if Heinlein might have drawn on this episode as inspiration for his ideas around service for citizenship.
The rest of the world is far more aware of American values and history, thanks to America's cultural imperialism and military hegemony, than the average American is of anything outside of their borders.
That's an extremely low bar given many of the Americans I've met.
Even in a comparitively similar country like Australia, where I live, Australians have a hard time understanding many basic American values, particularly political ones, in my experience
You can add test as requirement and pick top contestants, and you will have recruits who know American history, values, constitution etc better than Americans.
While I agree that many people would do well to have the kind of civic background knowledge they demand people acquire to gain citizenship, and it's an important part of integrating people into a society, there is also a lot that is acquired by living in a society for a time, experiencing and observing its contradictions and how it manages them personally, understanding how you navigate it and your place between two or more national identities and experiences, etc.
That said, I think there's a place for inviting people in. In America's case though, it seems like there's a huge reserve of people already in American society, both legally and illegally, that can be drawn on first. That to me seems like it should be the priority.
> experiencing and observing its contradictions and how it manages them personally, understanding how you navigate it and your place between two or more national identities and experiences, etc.
and serving in navy for 4 years is much smoother experience compared to green card lottery winners who are left on their own
> it seems like there's a huge reserve of people already in American society, both legally and illegally, that can be drawn on first.
I think the point is that reserve is not huge, because appeal is not that strong for those who are already in the US, hence navy drops requirements standards.
An extremely small outfit with extremely high selection criteria and a gruelling recruitment process, that's specifically structured to handle foreign recruits, and drills them extremely harshly in French language. Which offers a citizenship, that while nothing to sneeze at, is regularly not even taken up by some of its soldiers after they serve.
It's not a viable comparison to signing people up at the border to get US citizenship on any level.
However it could act as inspiration for any efforts to found a similar outfit in the States.
That's a really good point, although I think the smallness matters more in absolute terms, than relative terms. Both examples show that you can maintain a large foreign presence in your military though. The French Foreign Legion is highly, highly, selective though.
I don't know much about the Ukraine foreign legion, but being in an immediately existentially threatening conflict is a special case. I doubt the Ukrainians would wish for such a large foreign legion if they had the choice, although again, I don't know the history of its numbers prior to the war with Russia.
Between a quarter to a third of the union army was foreign born during the civil war (while the broader population was only about 10% foreign born).
That’s not to say all of them were non-citizens but the Union went out of its way to recruit abroad.
The scene in Gangs of New York where fresh off the boat immigrants were signed into the army was realistic. We have a long history of using freshly arrived folks in our military with no major problems.
I don't know enough about that to open my mouth much on it, but I'd say civil wars are a special case given they are often fought over specific principles, ergo, have a certain natural selection.
Further, you're talking about a time in America's history where standing armies were dispreferred, which is not what modern American militarism looks like at all.
Finally, as far as "foreign born" people go, as I said, I support the idea of military service being a route for them toward citizenship, I just don't think going down to the border and signing people up there is a good idea.
I think one interesting idea, although you might only be able to do it as a once off without creating too many bad incentives, would be to offer amnesty and a route to citizenship this way.
I don't have a dog in the fight though, I'm not American. The risks of making joining the armed forces a direct route to citizenship in one of the most desirable countries to immigrate to in the world is not negligible though, you need to be careful, lest your armed forces turn into green card mercenaries, with no value base.
I have no damned clue how they made it work, but I had several illlegal-as-children immigrant friends manage to get into the military and earn citizenship. Perhaps there was an Obama era program?
No better way to teach immigrants about the warlike nature of Americans than putting them through four years of combat in a forever war somewhere in the middle east or asia.
This is a good move - academic qualifications are an inadequate proxy for the skills and mentality needed to succeed in combat roles. Just look at the enemies that the US has fought over the decades - rice paddy farmers in Vietnam, illiterate goat herders in Afghanistan - all were formidable opponents who fought the US to a standstill, likely with a single SAT between them.
While this might well be correct, the argument is missing that academic qualifications conditional on growing up in the US (as supposed to in Afghanistan) are still a proxy for potentially useful skills. In other words, some of the enemies might have had comparable academic qualifications had they grown up in the US.
I disagree, as does the DOD. Smarter troops do their jobs better, such as better accuracy and faster trainability, and making better inferences. This is what the AFQT , ASVB shows based on decades of data among hundreds of thousands of recruits. Less intelligent recruits are a burden, which is why they are not recruited except during shortages during war time, and only sparingly.
Even if no GED/diploma req., they still must pass the AFQT and related tests
agree with this but academic qualifications do not map to being smart. There are different ways in which intelligence can be measured, I am sure the DOD will be using more effective measures to replace the education qualifications
> The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test.
It sounds like they really are just scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Navy is not a competitive employer right now given the ops tempo, living in close quarters on a ship, and poor compensation. Even for those who are inclined to join the military, why pick the Navy over the Air Force?
Very much agree. One of my best sailors was an E-3 Seaman who was dropped from electronic tech training for a DUI and became an undesignated seaman, the worst job you can get in the navy. He was better at certain things than the chief who’s been doing them for years but wasn’t the sharpest tool (he was awesome, I feel bad saying it). I ended up recommending he be reintroduced to the electronic tech program but he loved being in the deck division and ended up becoming a boatswains mate. I bet he was the best damn BM ever too.
Sure, we've seen some pretty funny videos of how idiotic the enemies can be, that isn't a good argument for saying our soldiers can be just as idiotic.
Kind... of. Both won by having enormously higher stakes and will to fight. Plus a ton of foreign aid. And neighboring friendly or at least too-disorganized-to-resist countries the US was reluctant (but not always wholly unwilling) to engage.
Both got badly stomped on a sheer damage-and-casualties-inflicted front, but didn't give up and had relatively safe space to retreat into and carry on logistics through (and foreign aid) that kept them from being counted out no matter how many times we punched them. But they were getting punched a lot, and hard, and weren't landing a ton of blows in return.
If one expects to be on the historical US side of an encounter like that, it's not clear to me that shifting to less-educated troops is going to help. The current approach kicks absolute ass—from a sheer military perspective. Especially against non-modern militaries (and there are very few fully modern ones—the training and equipment requirements to field a modern army are immense, expensive, and require a level of delegation of power that many kinds of states can't securely achieve). Uneducated farmers may have won those fights (while doing a hell of a lot of dying, and delivering rather poor damage in return) but I don't think it follows that the US military would be well-served by poorly-educated soldiers.
actually agree with everything you've said - aside from the last line. Educated is hugely over rated for the vast majority of combat work. Look at Ukraine / Russia - which has devolved into an attritional battle of conscript soldiers, many of whom are educated but uselessly so.
This is a matter of trade offs. 1 for 1 an educated soldier is probably better than an uneducated one. But when you factor in the cost of educating that soldier, then spending resources in assessing against skills developed in educational setting, you are probably better off just opening the doors and taking the rough with the smooth
You arent comparing like for like you are comparing a guerrilla soldier to a trained professional. I’d imagine if the US switched to that sort of doctrine we wouldn’t have the totally lopsided casualty counts we’ve had in recent conflicts.
Most people in the navy dont perform combat roles, most people are processing radar contacts, doing maintenance on highly sophisticated fighter jets, reprogramming radios, managing extremely dangerous fluid systems, operating an extremely high performance nuclear reactor. The doctrine the navy operates under necessitates a highly technically adept and well coordinated crews on several ships, anyone aboard that isnt qualified to be there is a threat to themselves and everyone around them.
Were this a hypothetical matter we could speculate what might happen if we lowered the standards; however, I will point out that the state of todays navy is that sometimes young airmen get cut in half by aircraft arresting cables, sometimes navy ships crash into cargo vessels, most maintenance hasnt been done to standard sometimes for over a decade, sometimes people fry the reactor plant control console. It would be difficult to argue in that light that we should lower the standards, I would instead propose some combination of the following
-raise the pay to attract qualified candidates
-shrink the responsibility of the navy, congress sets the op-tempo
-increased use of drones specifically, the navy has a proven track record of not keeping up with industrial automation and it is unreasonable to expect that to change given command structural doctrine, but drones can be fully self contained weapon systems that are installed onboard simply
You don't have to go back that far. The Army, at least, lowered the bar in all kinds of ways circa 2006-2010. It went badly enough that senior Army leaders, in the midst of the current recruiting crisis, have been adamant that they won't do it again. The result is that the Army is rapidly shrinking below the end-strength that the Army and Congress thinks is necessary. It remains to be seen how this will end.
Interesting, that parallels what I've heard about Affirmative Action in college admissions too; the student who get in from the lowered bar struggle and fail.
Just gonna float this out there... Maybe the US is better without so many people in the military. Do we really need to be everywhere? And I'm not saying let's walk away from conflict zones. I'm saying there's not that much of an need to patrol the north Atlantic, or defend Japan or keep troops in other places which were only relevant in 1948.
The more expensive it gets, the closer we get to a point of system failure. Whether you believe this to be good or bad is a function of your belief in value in US force projection and the human cost it incurs.
The real question isn't whether withdrawing from the North Atlantic, Japan, and similar locations will save money. Instead, it's about whether remaining there is more cost-effective than having to reclaim these areas in 20 years from adversaries who will certainly try to exploit the power vacuum.
Part of the shift to a large standing army is probably the MIC milking the taxpayer, as many suppose.
Another part, however, is that the pace of war is so high and the minimum required level of training and military organizational capability to be able to go toe to toe with a top-tier foreign power is so great that it's not been clear, since the end of WWII, that the US would again be able to take so very long to get rolling as it did in that war, if it wants to be able to project power abroad at all in a meaningful way against strong enemies.
IOW scaling back our military too much might well be the equivalent of bowing out of the first stage or two of the next great conflict, even more so than it was in WWII, and it's less clear all the time that our historical gigantic advantage of the two-ocean moat will give us so much leisure to prepare, or that we'd quite so easily be able to wrest back control of vital supply lines if another world war breaks out, having allowed the enemy to take them in the first place (even if it stays non-nuclear—if it goes that way, of course, we're in totally uncharted and very bad territory, for all concerned)
Then there's the domestic concerns: the military is the only jobs program with bipartisan support. College, free housing (including for a family!), free healthcare (ditto!), good education for your kids. Retirement! Why, it's practically a way for a blue collar American kid to opt into European-level social support (though with some, ah, significant costs). There are social-stability interests in keeping recruitment levels high.
> Maybe the US is better without so many people in the military. Do we really need to be everywhere?
Where do you not want to be? Europe as part of NATO? The Pacific to counter-balance China? The Middle East (to help protect shipping through the Suez Canal)?
I was in the navy as an officer. It’s a toxic cesspool, probably worse after 15 years now. The whole military needs some changes but the navy needs to change more. Senior officers need to give more respect to the enlisted and junior officers. Junior officers have to be trained as midshipmen (not the rank but the job) first so they can learn how to have good relationships with subordinates that know more than them. Junior officers need to realize they’re useless for a year or two and senior officers need to realize the same, so there’s less pressure to perform and more room to learn. Mentorship is dead in the navy, now it’s just yelling and bullying.
It is hearsay (i heard it from a French army officer a year ago), but it seems the only army corp in the western world who has improved in the last 15 years in an organizational point of view was the US army (and he said (translated, from a 1-year old memory) "The army in particular, not the airforce").
He was extremely critical of the French army culture, and high level officers especially (like you it seems) and said something like "but at least we aren't Spain or Italy", so i guess they're worse. He also said that one of the lesson from ukraine is that it showed how trash and susceptible to corruption "legacy officers" were, and hopefully officers families (some of which date back from Napoleon in the French army) will now be met with some suspicions.
I recently inquired about joining the Coast Guard (Reserves). I like their mission, I like that they help domestically especially with things like disaster relief and environmental issues, and sea-worthy things are in my wheelhouse. I reached out in THREE ways online and never got a callback.
I called my local office. The recruiter I talked to seemed to generally not care at all, I drove 90% of the conversation. Couldn't tell me what "rates" (jobs) the CG has and what would be applicable to my background. I'm stunned, I'm thinking this is literally your job to know this kind of a thing. The recruiter told me that I should go look at the jobs/rates on their website. Yep - go look at their website - which was offline for about at least week (or maybe still offline - I stopped checking).
This recruiter didn't offer to follow up, which would have been difficult because they also didn't bother to get any of my contact information, or even ask my name. My military friends absolutely could not believe this.
Of course, it could have been this particular military recruiter. Although I was also ignored in other channels, too. I'm thinking -
1 - Your branch is in DIRE need of people, both active and reserve. TEN cutters are being pulled from service, and nearly 30 boat stations are being closed.
2 - If you're this incompetent during the recruiting processes, what would service in your branch actually look like?
Not a great experience/impression. I may try again later (find a different recruiting office), but if this is how recruiting is being done, it's no wonder why they can't find warm bodies.
My understanding is that the Coast Guard is pretty selective and it's not easy to get into. Something like 15% acceptance rate. I don't think they're having the same recruiting difficulties as the larger branches.
> The Coast Guard has struggled to bring in recruits, failing to meet its enlisted goals for the past four years. In mid-2023, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan told Congress that the service was short 3,500 members, while the service's fiscal 2024 budget request reported a shortfall of 4,800, or nearly 10% of its force.
I don't cross paths with a lot of Coast Guard folks, but I was talking to one a few months ago who painted an ugly picture of what this looks like at the ground level. People from his station are getting pulled as individual augmentees for operational deployments in other places while everybody else works a number of double shifts to cover the duties at their own station.
With that said, I'm not shocked by webworker's story. Part of the recruiting crisis is due to the recruiting apparatus being pretty dysfunctional. Hence the article about the Coast Guard announcing reforms to who does recruiting and how they'll be trained. The Army also announced similar reforms last year.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/
I was watching a documentary about US Navy boot camp, and was wondering if people who are headed for in-demand roles are given more help/slack than generalists? There was someone with a college degree who was going to intelligence, and I doubted they'd be dumped as easily as someone who just scraped their way in.
Your intuition is sort of correct, but sort of backwards. First, someone who qualifies for an in-demand role is less likely than most recruits to wash out because they are more qualified than the average recruit to begin with. Second, if someone fails along the way to becoming an air traffic controller or linguist or some other difficult job, there are a lot of other jobs that they can step down to and handle with ease. So we'd say, "Hey, you didn't make it, but this is a tough program so there's no shame in that, and here's another program that we can send you to do instead, if you want." On the other hand, if someone signs up to be a shower and laundry specialist (yes, that's a real job) and they fail in that program, we probably don't have much else that they'd qualify for, so they might be out of luck no matter how much they want to stay in uniform.
Edited to add: Of course, "boot camp" is "boot camp" for everyone, (mostly) regardless of the specialty that they signed up for. I'm mostly speaking above about the second stage of training.
These decisions are made by training commanders pretty much on a case by case basis, often with the armed service's needs in mind. Everyone who's at enlisted basic training is needed, because it's about volume.
I enjoy the thought experiment immensely even if I disagree with the result / interpretation; I end up rereading the book every 3-5 years.
You have to "be a lawful permanent resident at the time of your naturalization interview" [1]. (On the other hand, you're eligible if "you served honorably in the U.S. armed forces for at least one year at any time.")
Proposal is that anyone can enlist, e.g. at the border.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita...
I do like the idea of military service as a route to citizenship though. But literally just signing people up at the border seems way too problematic and dangerous.
I agree. I assume we'd use foreign recruits to make up for domestic-recruiting shortfalls. The lack of knowledge of our history can be fixed with education; values, with selection criteria. I wouldn't be surprised if these immigrants turned out not only to be great fighters, but among the more patriotic Americans.
Considering the history of the French Foreign Legion, I’m disinclined to believe in the best possible outcome here.
History has taught this lesson.
A lot of Filipinos went this route in 70s or 80s (hazy on timeline here). They enlisted abroad as well, although I guess it’s a different situation when another country has Us navy bases.
https://www.quora.com/Do-any-Filipinos-serve-in-the-United-S....
Even in a comparitively similar country like Australia, where I live, Australians have a hard time understanding many basic American values, particularly political ones, in my experience
That said, I think there's a place for inviting people in. In America's case though, it seems like there's a huge reserve of people already in American society, both legally and illegally, that can be drawn on first. That to me seems like it should be the priority.
and serving in navy for 4 years is much smoother experience compared to green card lottery winners who are left on their own
> it seems like there's a huge reserve of people already in American society, both legally and illegally, that can be drawn on first.
I think the point is that reserve is not huge, because appeal is not that strong for those who are already in the US, hence navy drops requirements standards.
It's not a viable comparison to signing people up at the border to get US citizenship on any level.
However it could act as inspiration for any efforts to found a similar outfit in the States.
Maybe by us standards (1.4m active) - but the legion is almost 10k active personell - close to 10% of the French forces.
Still, Ukraine claim their foreign legion stand at 30k.
I don't know much about the Ukraine foreign legion, but being in an immediately existentially threatening conflict is a special case. I doubt the Ukrainians would wish for such a large foreign legion if they had the choice, although again, I don't know the history of its numbers prior to the war with Russia.
That’s not to say all of them were non-citizens but the Union went out of its way to recruit abroad.
The scene in Gangs of New York where fresh off the boat immigrants were signed into the army was realistic. We have a long history of using freshly arrived folks in our military with no major problems.
Further, you're talking about a time in America's history where standing armies were dispreferred, which is not what modern American militarism looks like at all.
Finally, as far as "foreign born" people go, as I said, I support the idea of military service being a route for them toward citizenship, I just don't think going down to the border and signing people up there is a good idea.
I think one interesting idea, although you might only be able to do it as a once off without creating too many bad incentives, would be to offer amnesty and a route to citizenship this way.
I don't have a dog in the fight though, I'm not American. The risks of making joining the armed forces a direct route to citizenship in one of the most desirable countries to immigrate to in the world is not negligible though, you need to be careful, lest your armed forces turn into green card mercenaries, with no value base.
[1] https://www.goarmy.com/how-to-join/requirements.html
This is a great proposal that could break the logjam on immigration reform.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Foreign_Legion
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_putsch_of_1961#:~:te....
This is tautological. It's a good measure because it's a good (proxy) measure. This is not a truism, stated this way.
> In other words, some of the enemies might have had comparable academic qualifications had they grown up in the US.
Maybe they would have all been geniuses. This is a wild guess about what intelligence/behavior results in superior combat troops, on average.
Even if no GED/diploma req., they still must pass the AFQT and related tests
agree with this but academic qualifications do not map to being smart. There are different ways in which intelligence can be measured, I am sure the DOD will be using more effective measures to replace the education qualifications
> The decision follows a move in December 2022 to bring in a larger number of recruits who score very low on the Armed Services Qualification Test.
It sounds like they really are just scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Navy is not a competitive employer right now given the ops tempo, living in close quarters on a ship, and poor compensation. Even for those who are inclined to join the military, why pick the Navy over the Air Force?
I think reducing qualifications is bad move.
Sure, we've seen some pretty funny videos of how idiotic the enemies can be, that isn't a good argument for saying our soldiers can be just as idiotic.
To win we should be better. Smarter.
Both got badly stomped on a sheer damage-and-casualties-inflicted front, but didn't give up and had relatively safe space to retreat into and carry on logistics through (and foreign aid) that kept them from being counted out no matter how many times we punched them. But they were getting punched a lot, and hard, and weren't landing a ton of blows in return.
If one expects to be on the historical US side of an encounter like that, it's not clear to me that shifting to less-educated troops is going to help. The current approach kicks absolute ass—from a sheer military perspective. Especially against non-modern militaries (and there are very few fully modern ones—the training and equipment requirements to field a modern army are immense, expensive, and require a level of delegation of power that many kinds of states can't securely achieve). Uneducated farmers may have won those fights (while doing a hell of a lot of dying, and delivering rather poor damage in return) but I don't think it follows that the US military would be well-served by poorly-educated soldiers.
This is a matter of trade offs. 1 for 1 an educated soldier is probably better than an uneducated one. But when you factor in the cost of educating that soldier, then spending resources in assessing against skills developed in educational setting, you are probably better off just opening the doors and taking the rough with the smooth
Were this a hypothetical matter we could speculate what might happen if we lowered the standards; however, I will point out that the state of todays navy is that sometimes young airmen get cut in half by aircraft arresting cables, sometimes navy ships crash into cargo vessels, most maintenance hasnt been done to standard sometimes for over a decade, sometimes people fry the reactor plant control console. It would be difficult to argue in that light that we should lower the standards, I would instead propose some combination of the following -raise the pay to attract qualified candidates -shrink the responsibility of the navy, congress sets the op-tempo -increased use of drones specifically, the navy has a proven track record of not keeping up with industrial automation and it is unreasonable to expect that to change given command structural doctrine, but drones can be fully self contained weapon systems that are installed onboard simply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100%2C000
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
It’s just been getting really expensive to do it the way we’ve been doing it.
Another part, however, is that the pace of war is so high and the minimum required level of training and military organizational capability to be able to go toe to toe with a top-tier foreign power is so great that it's not been clear, since the end of WWII, that the US would again be able to take so very long to get rolling as it did in that war, if it wants to be able to project power abroad at all in a meaningful way against strong enemies.
IOW scaling back our military too much might well be the equivalent of bowing out of the first stage or two of the next great conflict, even more so than it was in WWII, and it's less clear all the time that our historical gigantic advantage of the two-ocean moat will give us so much leisure to prepare, or that we'd quite so easily be able to wrest back control of vital supply lines if another world war breaks out, having allowed the enemy to take them in the first place (even if it stays non-nuclear—if it goes that way, of course, we're in totally uncharted and very bad territory, for all concerned)
Then there's the domestic concerns: the military is the only jobs program with bipartisan support. College, free housing (including for a family!), free healthcare (ditto!), good education for your kids. Retirement! Why, it's practically a way for a blue collar American kid to opt into European-level social support (though with some, ah, significant costs). There are social-stability interests in keeping recruitment levels high.
Where do you not want to be? Europe as part of NATO? The Pacific to counter-balance China? The Middle East (to help protect shipping through the Suez Canal)?
He was extremely critical of the French army culture, and high level officers especially (like you it seems) and said something like "but at least we aren't Spain or Italy", so i guess they're worse. He also said that one of the lesson from ukraine is that it showed how trash and susceptible to corruption "legacy officers" were, and hopefully officers families (some of which date back from Napoleon in the French army) will now be met with some suspicions.
I called my local office. The recruiter I talked to seemed to generally not care at all, I drove 90% of the conversation. Couldn't tell me what "rates" (jobs) the CG has and what would be applicable to my background. I'm stunned, I'm thinking this is literally your job to know this kind of a thing. The recruiter told me that I should go look at the jobs/rates on their website. Yep - go look at their website - which was offline for about at least week (or maybe still offline - I stopped checking).
This recruiter didn't offer to follow up, which would have been difficult because they also didn't bother to get any of my contact information, or even ask my name. My military friends absolutely could not believe this.
Of course, it could have been this particular military recruiter. Although I was also ignored in other channels, too. I'm thinking -
1 - Your branch is in DIRE need of people, both active and reserve. TEN cutters are being pulled from service, and nearly 30 boat stations are being closed. 2 - If you're this incompetent during the recruiting processes, what would service in your branch actually look like?
Not a great experience/impression. I may try again later (find a different recruiting office), but if this is how recruiting is being done, it's no wonder why they can't find warm bodies.
> The Coast Guard has struggled to bring in recruits, failing to meet its enlisted goals for the past four years. In mid-2023, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan told Congress that the service was short 3,500 members, while the service's fiscal 2024 budget request reported a shortfall of 4,800, or nearly 10% of its force.
I don't cross paths with a lot of Coast Guard folks, but I was talking to one a few months ago who painted an ugly picture of what this looks like at the ground level. People from his station are getting pulled as individual augmentees for operational deployments in other places while everybody else works a number of double shifts to cover the duties at their own station.
With that said, I'm not shocked by webworker's story. Part of the recruiting crisis is due to the recruiting apparatus being pretty dysfunctional. Hence the article about the Coast Guard announcing reforms to who does recruiting and how they'll be trained. The Army also announced similar reforms last year.