Big ball move, join the army for money and leave the moment a war is slightly possible

i came of recruitment age in burgerland a few years prior to the Eternal War on Everywhere and i admit there was a brief time approaching graduation from secondary school when i considered it. a lot of my friends went in and got out before 9/11. free college, health/dental while in, no worrying about getting fired, lots of perks toward home buying. the pitch was OK for a practical late teen who scored high on the tests but didn’t have the grades for a full ride to school. of the few who went in that overlapped with the start of afghanistan and iraq, the calculus was wildly different. they came back kinda fucked in the dome and were haunted by the prospect of having to stay in/go back. this was the last group of people who went in before the constant flag-fucking patriotism at every sporting event turned every bozo handing out socks in a tent into a hero of the republic. the default vibe was no longer dominated by broke assholes who signed up to “get their shit together” and rolled their eyes at all the oorah bullshit. i also knew more than a few who went in gung ho for a 20 year career only to exit as soon as their first enlistment period was over.

the kind of fool’s brain it takes to stay in the military during some bullshit war is always going to be limited, even if you give them only the finest treats and buttery cakes. unless you completely reorganize society into a fascist death cult and making survival outside of the military institution nearly impossible. european countries have a lot of social safety net programs left to kill if they want to up their recruitment/retention numbers while threatening active war shit. definitely gotta start letting them recruit minors at schools too, like they do in the states.

In the U.K., there’s been an annual hiring shortfall of 1,100 troops — equivalent to two infantry battalions — even though the government contracted out recruitment to private firm Capita.

“even though” I love how the unspoken assumption is that privatizing military recruitment would somehow lead to more recruits, just absolute worm-brained neoliberal nonsense

The dipshit Politico author doesn’t even realize he stumbled upon the prime reason for the shortfall in that sentence, lmao

Yes rapidly deindustrializing countries with a zombie obsession for state budget cuts, please conscript your increasingly angry population, make our jobs slightly easier danke