'I Wouldn't Encourage Anyone To Join': As Pentagon Goes Woke, Veterans Refuse To Help Military Recruitment Efforts

Veterans of the United States military are refusing to help out with efforts to relieve the Pentagon's acute recruitment problems citing the wokeness problem embedded in the current military structure as their reason to not get involved.

As reported by Just The News, the military has a major recruitment problem among Americans, however, that by itself is not exactly a new development. As previously noted by the DC Enquirer, while obesity rates are an external problem for the military force, wokeness poses an internal problem within the armed forces. The vast majority of Americans from the 17-24 demographic are, according to a Department of Defense study, unfit for military services - primarily due to obesity rates among that demographic. 

The Heritage Foundation's Director of the Center for National Defense, Thomas Spoehr, proclaimed that "Woke ideology undermines military readiness in various ways. It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex. It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements."

A lot of other military veterans like Spoehr have similarly weighed into the problem of wokeness in the armed forces.

Many veterans did not react as expected after the Navy Times published an article titled "Veterans may be key to solving the US military recruitment crisis" which called for veterans to be "deeply engaged at all levels of the recruitment process, modeling how meaningful a life of service can be." The Military Times wrote that in the aftermath of that article in Navy Times, the former outlet "was inundated with hundreds of emails from veterans saying they would do no such thing." Why? Most of those emails cited in one form or another wokeness. 

Some of those reactions are captured in the citations below from military veterans.
   
Peter Demas, a third-generation veteran, wrote that "I wouldn’t encourage anyone to join today’s armed forces and I discouraged both of my sons from considering serving...America’s military leaders have sold out the Services for their own advancement and reflect all the poorest qualities of civilian ‘leadership’ from whom they accepted thirty pieces of silver; instead of being the nation’s repository of integrity and moral courage, they have become more political than the political animals they grovel before." 

Dale Papworth, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, wrote that "[w]ith a woke military, whose most senior officer is concerned about ‘white rage,’ searching for a tattle tale process to discover and discharge white ‘extremists,’ blaming it on toxic masculinity, discharging real warriors for not getting vaccinated, having a two-day stand down to discuss white extremism, the promotion and expansion of women in combat, lowering physical fitness standards to accommodate naturally weaker women, recruiting with social justice and diversity ads, stating we need more female and minority pilots, promotions based on the color of one’s skin or genitalia, lowering recruiting standards, blaming the military for 247 years of institutional racism, is not the military I was in for 26 years."

One individual named Adam wrote that "My 19-year-old has expressed in no uncertain terms he does not want to serve in the U.S. military in any capacity...the politicization of our [government] institutions is creeping into the services now, and that is also having an effect. They may as well put out a sign that conservative or right of center Americans are not welcome. They just keep making it worse with their messaging. Boys want to be challenged and go on adventures, not be schooled on pronouns or the sins of their skin color. Girls want to beat boys and prove themselves." 

The response by the Pentagon to these concerns seems to be a doubling down of the woke ideology in the military. Evidentially, the brass and/or the politicians think that drag queen influencers will help drive recruitment numbers.

When Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) pointed out that drag queen shows appeared to be a funded event on military bases, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded by saying, "I'd like to take a look at those, because I don't agree with those. I think those things shouldn't be happening." A lot of veterans seem to concur.