The genesis of today's military recruiting crisis (2023)
militarytimes.com
militarytimes.com
My friend had used a telehealth counseling service during acutely stressful events and Genesis demanded records that the service couldn't really be bothered to produce. It refused records from the actual doctor. Genesis's nitpicky follow-ups really went poorly with the modern standard for customer service, which is mostly nonexistent outside of billing. The back-and-forth went on for 8 months until my friend gave up.
> Multiple recruiters on the ground, from different services and locations, are more blunt in their assessments. They say Genesis has ended an applicant’s ability to gloss over or knowingly ignore minor medical issues, such as past use of ADHD meds or inhalers, before signing up.
and a second quote without the disqualifier "ADHD meds", instead pointing to just mental health causes like ADHD or depression
> That makes it harder, some recruiters say, to squeeze applicants through despite past maladies they did not disclose — such as ADHD, depression or a years-old broken bone. Recruiting numbers suffer as a result. Previously, such applicants could enlist if they concealed, or genuinely had forgotten about, these issues.
I was in the Marines. In general, you cannot be lifelong dependent on medication. If you are, then you must be medically separated out or are ineligible to join. I always understood that this is the same standard that MEPS enforces.
The Air Force has a lot of luxuries that other branches don't have but I don't see MEPS using different standards for different branches.
way less of a problem in places with socialized medicine, since everyone is already in the system and it's easy to get records pulled -- e.g. check the box during application, wait several weeks, and go.
and there is no incentive to screw the military, since you can get that hernia problem fixed without them.
also, issuing medical and personel waivers to people who aren't 100% perfect is a way the military controlled inputs; during lean times you issue more waivers, give more people a pass who may not fit the bill otherwise.
Maybe the screening process is compensating to adjust to modern average people being less able to tolerate temporary or minor pain and setbacks and more willing to give up? But, yes, it's a cult of mandatory dishonesty and deception meant to shift the burdens of mental and physical healthcare onto the individual in an effort to deny them care and pretend problems don't exist. It's BS and it's actually weaker since you don't want to deploy folks who have unaddressed problems because they're the ones most likely to be liabilities in combat. And also it's an unwritten rule that mental and physical permanent injuries will be borne by the individual.. as part of being a warrior, regardless of care, but this isn't an excuse to cheap out or abuse GIs. (One of great uncles was a DV who died homeless while his (ex-)wife took his check and the VA did nothing.)
Like in many things in life, follow the incentives. Recruiters tell people to lie on the medical forms because that boosts the recruiters' metrics. But somebody with a high rank doesn't want unhealthy troops because they'll be grilled if those troops aren't fit for battle, or worse, take their own lives, so they may keep arguing for stringent health screening criteria.
they don't want to be responsible for health care, esp. because it's absurdly expensive in the US. once you're in the military is responsible for your care, and if it's likely your knees are going to snap during training, even if just 10%, they don't want to take the financial risk.
like, you getting killed is easy; pay out SGLI once and send a flag to someone's house. but the cost of broken troopers goes on forever, and it may cost 2 Trillion in total for Iraq and AFG because of veteran's care.
https://usafacts.org/articles/military-recruitment-is-down/ ("USAfacts.org: Military recruitment is down. Why don’t young Americans want to join? A diminishing pool of Americans are eligible to join the Army, Navy, or Air Force. An even smaller pool want to.")
https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-recruiting-crisis-vete... | https://archive.today/W23Jq ("WSJ: The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Families to Join")
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2024-08-15/military-sexu... ("Stripes: Military sexual assaults far exceed DOD estimates, new report finds")
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/suicide-now-the-primary-cau... ("Boston University: Suicide Now the Primary Cause of Death among Active Duty US Soldiers")
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-sham... ("Rolling Stone: The Shameful Way America Treats Its Veterans")
With my apologies to Jordan Belfort, "Sell me on this job."
Government applications for things in general have way too many “have you ever in your life” questions. No recognition at all that people change throughout their lives, medically and otherwise.
Perhaps not for nothing that "America starts wars for oil" is a well-tread Zoomer meme.
I suspect it's more a cultural change than anything specific to the military. Different times, different attitudes.
His experience in the army eroded most of that. Fumbled recruiting promises; repeated injury and incompetent treatment; frustrated advancement goals. Ended up a Sargeant, could have done so much more. Eventual medical discharge from accumulated health problems.
"Jack's chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors' patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power an incompetent."
Compared to wartime: Both grandfathers lied about their ages (17) to enter WW2 and weren't particularly ultra-fit or healthy: one became a paratrooper commando who was severely injured (paratroopers don't actually jump into combat anymore), and the other was a forward-deployed radio tech. Each topped out at E8 and E7 respectively. First grandpa retired with triple retirements when that was possible.
Know...
They aren't hitting you because the trash can bounced off the bed you were next to.
If they don't like you they'll make you exercise yourself until you break your hip.
You aren't violating the Geneva convention if you accidentally hit the person with that weapon that is not approved for use against people if you were targeting the equipment you were standing next to.
Honor, courage, and commitment you say?
I made the mistake of saying.
After two weeks of painting curbs and cutting the lawn with hedge trimmers, I found myself moving from Monterey to the Mojave in my dress blues. There I found myself in a Catch-22 style administrative black hole where I couldn't get orders until I was assigned to a school and couldn't be assigned to a school until I had orders.
There were some incredible people but it was a very mixed bag.
... and the article is likely related to the current headlines[1]. And here, I'd note that if the state starts looking for the "gender non-conforming", it's going to be finding more and more of them.
[1] "Donald Trump ‘to expel all transgender people from military’" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/11/25/donald-tr...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2024/11/25/donald-tr...
There are legit concerns here - medical conditions that are treatable after an ambulance ride or urgent care visit in the US or a modern country may require medical evacuation in theater. Medicines may not be able to be resupplied depending on logistics, and people who require them often have to deploy with a 90-180 day supply of what they need. And though the military has much to do to eliminate toxic leadership, military service will be inherently stressful in the best of units, which indicates against admitting people with certain mental conditions.
That said, I'm skeptical that things like milder ADHD cases, some other milder or resolved mental issues, sprains, broken bones, etc. truly need the amount of scrutiny and skepticism that military medicine gives them. Seems to my non-doctor point of view that disqualifying potential enlistees or commissionees en masse is the "easy button." It doesn't incur risk to say "no," only "yes." But if medical doesn't take a hard look on when to say "yes,' we're missing the next Jack Kennedy (whole hosts of issues), Bill Halsey (shingles), or who knows what superstar commander who'd take us through the next big fight.
Also, banning recruiters from schools is juvenile and disgusting. I'm thankful I had a mom and dad who supported my dream to fly jets off an aircraft carrier instead of trying to crush it for their own selfish fears.
And I think letting them in is problematic . They only target the poor schools anyway. Which actually is pretty ‘disgusting’ to me.
You don’t get to claim the moral high ground here.
Nor do I, but I wasn’t attempting to by using words like ‘disgusting’ to describe any difference in opinion.
Why did you do that?
Why are you unable to talk about this without reaching for such obvious rhetorical props?
The three schools around me are among the richest in the state and all have recruiters visit regularly. What’s your source for that belief?
The US has very little social programs, on purpose. Those social programs ARE the military. If you need help to pull you out of poverty, you go into the military. Then you get education, healthcare, affordable housing, and guaranteed work - the typical social benefits you'd see in a modern democratic socialist nation. They're simply "rebranded" to fit the American dream, and, in turn, provide the military with a steady supply of warm bodies.
The military, at it's core, is nothing more than a work program and tiny little socialist nation within the US.
The rich don't join the military because they don't have to. These social benefits are for average to poor Americans.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military
I called it disgusting because it disgusts me when people immaturely tar military service as immoral or lesser. There is no shame in serving the duly-elected government of a constitutional liberal democracy, and every human society which exists needs a military. Witness Ukraine.
There is certainly a lingering, and I don't think unjustified, perception that recruiters prefer the desperate and the easily swayed, even if the leadership does not. This dates back to the Vietnam era, and Project 100,000.
Part of it is that middle-class as defined on that page is specifically those who are poor enough to not be able to afford college from their family's preexisting wealth, but not so poor that they qualify for need-based full-rides at most schools. So you get a lot of kids joining up for the GI bill, and not necessarily out of a surplus of innate patriotism or sense of civic duty. Not all, I'd say about 1/3 of the people I've known who served signed up specifically for the GI bill, but those that did joined the Navy or the Air Force, or they signed up prior to September 11 (one friend signed up in August of 2001, just before the start of his senior year of high school).
There's also the issue that as family income drops, the odds of meeting the entry requirements also drops. As family income drops, the odds of a having a criminal record rises (this is true for a lot of different reasons, only some of them the would-be applicant's fault). For all of their recruiting issues, the military still has baseline occupational standards. You have to be able to place high enough on the ASVAB to be admitted to your preferred branch of service, and as a standardized test, it still correlates to socioeconomic background. That is, if you're poor, you're probably going to do worse on the ASVAB, regardless of your actual aptitude.
I am sympathetic to the desire to keep recruiters out of high schools and colleges, but that's mainly because it seems perverse to me to let kids sign up to kill and die (and risk prison for trying to weasel out of it) before they're old enough to buy alcohol or rent cars. I think we should keep recruiters out of high schools and colleges for the same reason we should ban student loans: most 18 year-olds simply lack the experience and discernment to understand what they're signing up for.
Colleges in particular are a peculiar place to scoff at people's decision-making skills, considering the end product of that particular environment is a commissioned officer who in just 3-4 years will be responsible for flying a fighter into combat, commanding an infantry company, or standing Tactical Action Officer watch in charge of employing the full weapons loadout of a guided missile destroyer. Junior military officers hold responsibilities and accountabilities at a young age that their civilian counterparts couldn't dream of holding.
Go look at what those 25-year-olds were doing off the coast of Yemen recently in the most intense sustained combat ops the US Navy has seen since World War II.
Most other jobs that an 18 year old can get do not require a multiyear commitment.
But, you're also not wrong. If I say you're not old enough to sign up for the service, I'm also saying you're also not old enough to say get a loan for $40,000 of tuition without so much as a credit check. I'm less appalled at military recruiters on high school campuses, and more appalled at the weird magic we all believe happens at 12am on everyone's 18th birthday. Like, yesterday, you were too immature to sign a lease, or buy a rifle, or vote, and you should 100% listen to people in authority, because they know what's best, but today, you're more than mature enough to take on every shred of responsibility for all the things you are legally entitled to, and if any of those people in authority take advantage of you for their own selfish ends, it's at least 50% your fault for what happens to you.
I do draw a distinction between serving in the military and any other job for 2 reasons. First is the obvious. There are very few, vanishingly few, civilian jobs where you may be asked to take a life. Most police departments require that police be over 21, even. Second, there are very few, vanishingly few, civilian jobs where if you just up and decide one day that the job is not for you and quit, no-call-no-show, you go to jail, and permanently damage your ability to get any other job and certain kinds of government assistance, for the rest of your life. Its weird to me that we're just a-ok with (again) 18 year olds making that decision, given that we don't let them buy handguns or alcohol, or rent cars. We obviously, as a society, decided they lack the good judgement to make those kinds of decisions, and accept those kinds of responsibilities on their own.
What I'm saying is that buck privates getting ludicrous financing terms on a Dodge Charger from the dealer nearest the barracks is such a meme for a reason.
That said, the vast majority of military jobs are not combat-coded. They involve mundane things like fixing aircraft, crewing ships, doing admin paperwork, moving boxes, and so on.
My issue is specifically with recruiters driving enlistment right out of high school, especially for jobs that don't have much of a civilian equivalent market. My friends the nuke techs, or the guy I knew who did something with missile controls on a guide missile cruiser were pretty much in the same spot as when they started, but with the GI bill (although only one of those three used it). The guy I knew from high school who deployed to Afghanistan got a Purple Heart and a Combat Lifesaver certificate, but not much else before he was old enough to buy a beer.
Yeah, its an important job, but its just a job, and we don't let Walmart try to drive applicants in 3rd period. If the steady diet of nationalism and militarism that kids get from age 3 on isn't enough to get them to join up, maybe we should rethink letting them interrupt Algebra 2 to dangle $50k in front of a bunch of 17 year olds.
I knew a guy who retired from a TLA after a long period of doing security checks on new hires. He said that people who try to be honest generally fail the interview. "If you ever apply there, just say "No" to everything."
It's like speeding, if everyone is always speeding, then a police officer can always pull you over for whatever secret reason they have. If everyone lies to get into the military they can always blame the victim for lying.
Now Genesis came along and made everyone strictly play "by the rules," and exposed the problems with this kind of black-and-white thinking. It turns out the standards the military was REALLY operating on were not the standards they thought they were getting. And the standards they REALLY were operating under got the job done, whereas the strictest standards they COULD apply would result in not being able to staff the force, because doctors were not willing to incur enough risk.
Ultimately, it becomes a question of whether or not to break a rule at potentially little or no consequence to accomplish an important goal, or to be so pedantic at applying the rules that the organization cannot achieve its goals. The FAA and airlines have the same problem. Scores of airline pilots hide and fail to report medical conditions so as not to lose their jobs. And eventually someone goes nuts and tries to crash a commuter plane. But for that one nutjob who obviously shouldn't have been flying, there's scores of airline pilots fudging their paperwork and seeing docs off-network for cash who nonetheless safely and effectively fly their aircraft. So what IS the standard, or what should it be? Because the black-and-white standard then becomes just a lie doctors tell themselves to avoid risk.
https://www.ausa.org/articles/no-time-literally-all-requirem...
Think of the last time you interacted with a tech support person who refused to deviate from their script. Now imagine that, but directing operations in a war zone.
> A system that required dishonesty wasn’t honorable and it seems odd to blame the software/system that exposed that.
Personally I would place the majority of the blame on the people who designed and deployed this software.
At best, inflexible software that programmatically enforces standard operating procedure is ignored by the folks on the ground.
At worst, it craters mission readiness until someone with sufficient authority to make "a more flexible, nuanced screening process" takes notice and updates doctrine.
>Military brass have blamed an under-educated public, a roaring civilian jobs market and bad perceptions of service fueled by negative headlines.
>But multiple recruiters who spoke with Military Times blame Genesis above all else.
Lol, they're probably all right to various extents.
I'm gonna lose less than zero sleep over reduced availability of cannon fodder for future boondoggles in the sandbox. God forbid the people who call the shots exercise a little more restraint. If there is a true need to have more bodies in uniform then the political will will surely materialize to get it done.
To put it bluntly. The sort of young man who does this is not at all into the various social programs the military has now been implementing. Moreover, they started scrutinizing the basic, popular political beliefs of many of the recruits. Those interested in the Navy tend to be of a particular political persuasion, and even those who do not share that tend to have similar underlying belief structures.
What my friend wanted to be a career ended up being the minimum required years of service. It's unfortunate. They lost a loyal, educated officer. For what? What was gained by their novel program?
At the end of the day, the military is a thing that many young men are attracted to. We can debate the reasons why until the cows come home, but the military can choose to either build upon that innate attraction or pursue a different direction, and they've frankly chosen the latter. At every step of the way, they trample upon the factors that led these young men to join, and then they wonder why no one wants it anymore.
From my perspective, they've achieved something that few civilizations in history have managed, which is to make the armed forces actively unattractive to vast swaths of young males.
This whole comment is weird, what "political persuasion" is here? The armed forces do not filter out people of a "particular political persuasion" unless this phrase means "person with ties to terrorist groups".
You know... if there were no recruiting crisis, your criticism would be fine, but since there is a recruiting crisis, maybe it would behoove those in power to listen.
> swastika tattooed or show up with a KKK hood you're going to get in.
Highly doubtful since he's -- to use the colloquial term -- 'of color'.
Social programs? You mean the policy of not discriminating based on gender or sexual preference?
> they started scrutinizing the basic, popular political beliefs of many of the recruits
It seems prudent to scrutinize political beliefs that might be incompatible with treating a non-cishet male colleague as an equal (or a superior, as the case may be) or regarding such colleagues with dignity and respect.
What is the point of the military?
So again, which "social programs" were you referring to in your argument?
It really ought to be obvious, but many of the sorts of young men who join the military and who are attracted to it and would make good fighters are not into transgender troops, women in combat, or flamboyant homosexual men (they're not into flamboyant straight men either). Many of the type of troop we need are attracted to the military because it is -- historically at least -- a men's hierarchical organization. Not only has the military embraced social issues that turn men off, it also offers dual standards (physical standards are lower for women) and affirmative action when promoting (yes... it's still legal for military academies to use affirmative action... they're exempt!). We can either accept this reality and have enough people volunteer, or ignore it, and be where we're at today.
This is not controversial, and honestly is irrelevant to my or yours belief system.
Which is why I asked the question of the purpose of the military. It's not a jobs program. It's to hone warriors who will protect this country. Now, if the Pentagon says we need X warriors and only Y < X show up, this is a problem because the country is undefended. There are a few ways out. Either the pentagon is wrong in its estimates of how many troops are necessary for national security, or, by embracing these novel social issues, the military has eroded national safety, thus negating the very purpose of its existence.
In reality, America projects power daily through its military and this has an unquantifiable effect on world safety and shipping ability
The problem is the differential standards by population (i.e. equity).
Yeah, completely wrong. Great article on this from one of my former flight instructors.
There's a lot vague references here to things that are never revealed. I don't think I'm alone in perceiving it as an author deliberately hiding guilty details which would devastate the "reasonableness" of their complaint.
To illustrate the idea:
Person A: "The state cannot criminalize healthy joint exercises, natural bodily functions, and freedom of expression! This is an outrage to be condemned by every free-thinking man!"
Person B: "For the last time sir, you can not fastball-pitch your own feces at people in line for the movie you dislike."
I have high doubts about this in modern days. Military used to get some recruits, then keep a good chunk of them because of sunk cost fallacy once you realize the hardships. Nowadays, you can see the sacrifices you have to make in your life by just googling it, and just not signing up for military. It's just less "sexy and cool", even from hyper-masculine perspective.
But the article is talking about recruiting first from the general public. American men have very much feminized over the past 50 years.
I remember back how the high school seniors at my school in 2002 had mustaches, were smoking cigarettes, they looked like full grown men.
Something has changed. I think a social premium on safety also results in a poorer recruiting class in the U.S.
And no, Warrior Culture has nothing to do with your prejudiced view, I'd die for my former brothers, because they would die for me. I would never do the same for anyone in my scrum team.