I understand the the Bureau of Covering up the Dismal State of the US Economy had to revise its lying numbers rather drastically a little while ago because about 900,000 of the 1.2 million jobs they said had been created in the Biden economy simply never happened and never existed. I sort of wonder what impact this has on military recruiting but anecdotally what I'm getting is that there are jobs out there if you want them as a job entrant and some of them actually pay pretty damned well. They range from full time to part time and seem to exist if you look hard enough in spite of the damned practice my spy tells me about which is that all those Help Wanted ads one sees taped on the doors of various businesses are just for show and that they're not really hiring anyone.
It occurs to me to wonder if that means that a greater number of our youth are more interested in taking up one of the duties of citizenship and joining the semi-armed forces. I see that the numbers are so dire in the Coast Guard Drug Fishing industry that they have laid up dozens of cutters and boat stations all over the place. They simply cannot find the bodies to throw at the fun problem of driving a rescue boat or maintaining helicopters and boats or in manning marine safety positions. I don't know if it's the truly dismal leadership or the fact that we simply gave up and surrendered in the War on Drugs and it all seems rather pointless now.
The Army and Navy are also having trouble meeting their recruiting and retention goals. I don't like to mock sincere men who talk a big game but watching a Marine General try to explain that the Marines really needed to retain a much larger percentage of their first term enlistees was quite remarkable. You can indeed convince an 18 year old man to do just about any damned fool thing but they grow out of that phase and by the time their 22 or 23 they've grown up and started looking for a life that doesn't involve being treated as a fully disposable clothes rack.
The Army's problems with manpower have grown so severe they've essentially stood down an entire Army Division in numbers and said, 'with our revised recruiting number we're not meeting our new and much reduced manpower requirements. The Navy isn't talking anymore and I stopped believing anything they had to say on the topic of manning right about the time they made the decision to shut down Orlando Naval Training Center and San Diego Naval Training Center in favor of keeping gang infested and controlled Great Lakes Naval Training Center as our sole source of Navy enlisted training. That has to be one of the stupidest unforced errors to ever hit Navy Recruiting. It doesn't help to see that our ships are now extending on 9 and 12 month deployments again instead of the 6 months we wanted and that the number of port calls and visits has been reduced in order to meet Operating Tempo Requirements that keep our ships in the Red Sea and North Arabian Sea.
Port calls there used to include exciting Brief Stops for Fuel in Aden, Yemen until the terrorists blew up USS Cole when it pulled in for a quickie at the fuel pier. Say what you want about Fat Lenard and the totally bogus Fat Lenard fake scandal of giving a ship's husbanding agent details about the ships' movements well in advance so that arrangements to fuel, resupply and paint them in port could be made in advance, at least none of the ships in the Pacific were blown up by some 'friend of the ship chandler' who knew well in advance what ships would be making stops in Aden and probably knew it long before the guys in Bahrain did.
Other exciting ports of call I recall from my time in the Red Sea included Mombasa (very nice) and Djibouti (a horrible place) and then we were going to visit Mogadishu but we got a message from our Ambassador there who told us the place was dangerous, violent and even the trees have VD and we decided to skip it. (It does pay sometimes to be on the flagship when this sort of question comes up). The great liberty ports on the NAS coast include exciting Khor Fakkan (no), Muscat, and Fujairah. While Muscat was nice there is nothing at all there. Other unmentionables in the Red Sea include Hurgada, Yanbu and Jeddah and no, you don't want to go to any of them either.
If you cross the NAS heading east you can troll the Iranian coast and Jask and maybe find out if the ship's defenses are up to dealing with C-801 and C-802 missiles and whatever other excitement the Iranians have going on and then spend an awful visit pierside in Karachi. I wouldn't recommend it and I don't know if we pay port calls there anymore or not. Pakistan is an insane place.
You don't see any posh liberty ports like Rota, France, Naples, the Adriatic Coast, up the Bosphorus or another charming port call in Turkey or Haifa and I'm guessing nobody is stopping in Alexandria or Beirut. It just doesn't seem to have the old cachet where Navy crews could expect to make port calls in Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and a score of other nice places and of course the Army still remains the service with the unofficial motto of, join the Army, travel the world, meet interesting exciting people and kill them.' It just doesn't sound the same when you have nothing but ignorant and stupid leaders who never found an African shithole they didn't think was suitable habitat for a couple hundred American soldiers to broaden themselves. They have, as the saying goes, run out of places like that in Asia but that's probably only temporary.
I wonder what the DACOWITS investigators are finding these days about women in the service and what their reports look like. They may now well be every bit as classified as the Navy's Insurv reports are and very closely held. I can't think it's that bad though. After all, we have women in charge or at the very top of all the Armed Forces and the Coast Guard. What could go wrong?
6 comments:
You might say I was a sort of Strategic First Class. For one year I directly worked for the Port Visit Scheduler (He was Staff 0-5), he let me assign visits per an annual force engagement schedule, throughout a region. He pretty much let my proposals stand, daily, so I sent out the messages and would slip my favorite previous ships into good/crappy ports on my whims. Deyo and Elrod were favorites of mine. Hurghada and a couple of other dank ports of call. But there were also some really good deals, too. Antalya, Marmaris come to mind.
I'm going to make a dumb comment which has probably been said many times in many different ways on many different blogs.
Recruitment begins at home: it begins with the parent's love and appreciation of the country in which they live; it used to be called patriotism - a dirty word today.
An equally important palce in which recruitment begins is the public school which 90% of our youth attend for the first 12-13 years when they're highly impressionable: take a good look at what (let me repeat that word "what") is teaching them today. Not veterans, but men who went into education to escape the armed service, not concientious objectors, but mama's boys who were afraid that they might get hurt, their bodies or their psyches, or even, G-d forbid,, they might get killed in the service of their country.
And the politicians let this happen: not only let this happen, but a huge majority made this happen - as long as they could live (very) comfortably on your tax dollar.
Please, don't speak to me of not meeting recruitment quotas; in the current climate, I'm amazed that we have any young men who volunteer (except those who want to get their sex changed); they've been inculcated with anti-war and anti-patriotism slogans and music from day one on through their teen years.
They're never taught John F. Kennedy's iconic words of wisdom:
"Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." - neither at home nor in school.
That was pretty much how I remembered it working at 5th Fleet/NAVCENT back in 96. We kept trying to engage in Eritrea and the damned war there would explode anew. Otherwise it was pretty dismal in our AOR except Mahe and Mombasa. Everyone liked the ports in the Gulf but they tended to reflect the world circumstances viz barge liberty or a nice time in town at the souk by gold, carpets and perfume.
My father was West Point and in for 26 years, his father was West Point and in for about 30 years. I was in for 30 years. My sister was in Air Force for 5 years as was her husband. Not one soul in an extended family of over 100 or any of my 8 nephews have expressed the slightest desire in joining up. School I attended were DoDs schools or in military towns. My daughter on the other hand is interested in NUPOC and submarines and is also a frosh at local university so we'll see.
I'm kind of curious what the NAC's turn up on recruits and potential recruits. We had the one transmitted to us out in the IO asking if we wanted to keep a fireman now that it was revealed that he had a 3 page rap sheet from growing up in Chicago. We separated him for the good of the service (in lieu of Mast) and flew him home from Diego Garcia.
I was never reflexively anti-war; Reagan and family saw to that. On the gripping hand, there isn't a war anywhere on earth right now that is worth a single American life or a single American $.
My story is entirely different; my folks came from eastern Europe before the first third of the last century and my dad was in a non-draftable occupation, though why they didn't snap him up as a translator still astounds me to this day; he made no secret of being fluent in all of the European languages, as well as a lot of the local dialects, albeit with a Hungarian accent - some people have that gift. My mom could speak nothing but English.
My folks brought me up to love and respect the United States of America, so it came as no surprise to them that I signed up for the AF my first day of dental school to go on active upon graduation.
It came to me sometime while I was in high school that I had an obligation - a debt: if my folks hadn't left Europe for the United States when they did, I'd probably have been born in an oven.
So, you knew Keavney... I was describing '96, too...
Post a Comment