Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Peak and
Yona Show returning and somebody I always enjoyed talking to
Lee Enfield.
Speaker 2: How you doing, Hey, Pete, how are you? Thanks for
having me back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, Well, once you hit some plugs right up front,
and uh, you know, then we'll we'll jump into this
uh something that I can't remember the last time I
did an episode where it was like based on a tweet.
But I think this is a good one. So I
want to hit some plugs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, My name is Lee. I write over at
in block Press. It's E N B l O C
press dot com. It's a newsletter about predprinting, guns and politics.
Speaker 3: So yeah, let's go check it out.
Speaker 2: We've got a paid entree option over there you can
content each week. And yeah, again, Pete, thanks for having
me on. This is an interesting topic. I saw this
and I was like, huh, that's that's interesting, So I
was happy to get the invite.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cool man, All right, well let's jump right in.
Then I'm gonna pull the tweet up so we both
can uh anyone who's watching the video.
Speaker 3: Too.
Speaker 1: And this is from a tweet from Catgirl Coolock, a
narcoonomic con and yep, just for people. So people know
cat girl Coolock is actually a male, so Lee had
Actually I didn't know that, and I suspected it, I
didn't know it for sure. And then Lee's like, well, uh,
I heard him on on Alex Cashoota's show. And I'm like,
how did I How did I miss that one? So
I'm feeling a little bit dumb here, But you ready
to let me just start reading this and you can
interrupt me anytime you want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go ahead, all.
Speaker 1: Right, So the tweet goes and this is a long
one why no one wants to join the military, And
well before we do that jump and uh, obviously, opsee's
really important for you. Do you want to talk at all,
give people a little idea of what your military service
or anything like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm g wat Vett.
Speaker 2: Did you know one tour in Iraq just a normal
infantry guide in one contract got out feels like ancient history.
I mean I got out in two thousand and eight,
so it's been a minute. The military has obviously changed,
but some of some of the stuff that we're going
to talk about is kind of timeless concepts. And so yeah,
just a regular guy. But yeah, I did do tour
in Iraq with eighty second so it's something I can
talk about with some degree of familiarity.
Speaker 1: All right, So, like I said, interrupt me any time.
So an arconomic con says starts out. I've been reading
The Second World War by Sandhurst military historian John Keegan.
It explained a ton about nineteenth century early twentieth century
military culture. I didn't get the Edwardians were patriotic as hell.
The military was massively popular, the average person eight twelve
hundred calories a day, whereas soldiers in garrison ate fourteen
hundred and higher quality food at that It was a
massive education and networking opportunity for people of all classes,
and produced bonds that would be necessary for social advancement.
Conscription was massively popular and demanded from the population during peacetime,
less because they wanted to make sure no one was shirking,
and more because they didn't want lower class people left
behind and all the opportunity and the army hoarded by
the connected who'd be able to get into a volunteer force.
In Britain, which had always a board conscription and had
Whig pro libertarian objections to it, the populace practically rebelled
and formed illegal regiments and militias and drilled to participate
in martial life. This was a phenomenon across Europe, and
after the Treaty of Versailles restricting Germany to a scent
one hundred thousand strong army, the country was flooded with
free crops, non government paramilitaries and militias to either advance
some political movement or just be part of military life.
This was after World War One. Millions of young men
had just died as part of regiments many little different
than this, and yet there was this much demand from
young men to be part of the martial world. This
is because the military and military life was actually a
good career move and actually formed lifelong bonds. In the
early twentieth century, amidst the population boom of the early
twentieth century and all the access and all the excess
young men with little inheritance, the military and militia life
was a major vehicle for social mobility and aspiration and
forming social connections. So what changed? Why is it almost
completely opposite in early twenty first century America. These attitudes
survived the World Wars, even the Western Front of World
War I, but they were devoured by Vietnam and the
Civil rights era. Implicit in a lot of nineteenth and
twentieth century militarism was the vision of every soldier a citizen,
every citizen a soldier. This ethos was first expressed during
the French Revolution. It was aspirational. The subjects, divorced from
the state and military were now armed and able to
participate in civic and military life. They were now citizens.
Of course, by the early twentieth century this sounds very menacing.
Soldiers must obey orders every day. If every citizen a
soldier and bound to obey on pain of death, that's totalitarianism. Indeed,
a friend recently said, you know, the Wymer Republic may
have been the only true democracy in history. We talk
about how your vote matters and your deciding your government,
but really the public has little say. Barack Obama versus
John McCain was literally the option presents it to America.
That was their spectrum of options. Whereas Wymer Germany, they
had monarchism, liberalism, communism, fascism all right there on the ballot,
and any of them could win, and one of them did.
It wasn't a coincidence that this seeming pinnacle of democracy
exactly coincided with and produced the era when the most
men were in uniform and many women in auxiliaries. The
ethos of universal suffrage and universal conscription went hand in
hand with the contradiction that implies, are you master of
your country? Or is every other person in your country
now master of you? Are you empowered with your I
assume that's rifle to move politics, to move the politics
of Europe? Or is that rife? Do you know.
Speaker 2: I read it as rifle? I think it's just okay.
Speaker 1: So are you empowered with your rifle to move the
politics of Europe? Or have you been enslaved to your
state people and their faith? One might think this is
the source of their disillusionment, But America had conscription and
its nineteen forties marshal ethos through the fifties and into
the sixties. But of course there's a contradiction between universal
suffrage and this masculine, martial conception of the citizen. Why
is the vote of a woman or disabled man who've
never served equivalent to a man who's been taxed years
of his life and often extraordinarily risk and effort how
exactly does racial equality work when some groups are underrepresented
a military life and are perceived to be underrepresented in
the most dangerous roles. These questions were papered over with discrimination.
What did you do during the war was an interview
question that made or broke your entire economic life. In
a world where a massive percentage of people had served,
this was a massive inducement to do so, and indeed
you could still hear concerns about missing a war in
the fifties and being shut out of the aspirations and
opportunities available to other luckier cohorts of young men. Obviously,
even though there was little legal barriers to women fulfilling
most corporate and professional roles, this fact of life was
a massive barrier. But then the sixty four Civil Rights
Act was passed and the logic of it necessitated affirmative
action to women and underrepresented minorities. Whilst, at the same time,
a new generation of upper middle class young men, insulated
by one of the most abundant and forgiving economies in
world history, were encouraged by family and friends to either
avoid the draft with bogus medical excuses, hide out in university,
or indeed dip out of the country for a spell,
and far from suffering a fatal blow to their career
and social prospect. For what previous generation would have called cowardice,
they were rewarded. Military service became increasingly a marker of
the lower class, and the liberal educated non serving class,
already critical of the war out of self serving concern
to not be drafted, latched onto tales of war crimes
in Vietnam, often going so far as insulting and spitting
literally or figuratively on returning soldiers. Not wealthy enough to
dip into university, there were no return parades. Benefits were
often non existent, with some unable to health care for
even malaria, a disease in New Yorker probably didn't catch
at home. And not only were they not given priority
in employment. Lacking both the right ethnicity and the university degree,
where are the only qualifications protected from a disparate impact assessment,
many fell to the bottom of the economic letter. America's
recruitment capacity really never recovered. Total US military personnel shrank
from three point five in nineteen sixty nine to two
million in nineteen eighty five to one point three million today,
even as the US population has increased from two hundred
million to three hundred and thirty million. America has gone
from over one percent of the population actively serving at
any time to nearly a third of that. The professionalization
of the US military to an all volunteer force has
an effect just been a cover for this collapse in
recruiting capacity. America's military isn't significantly structurally different. These aren't
really professionals. Your average three year contract private isn't making
some obscene yeppie amount of money for his ambitious professional commitment.
A private makes under thirty thousand a year. A second
lieutenant with a university degree and years of professional development,
who may have had who may have had to plan
out his career from sixteen years old getting a congressman's
letter of recommendation to AT ten West Point or another
service academy, makes forty to sixty thousand a year. USGD
per capita is seventy two thousand. If that lieutenant had
gone to a second tier school and gotten a computer
science degree, he'd be making six figures and have vastly
more control over his life. It's not a good career move.
In the seventeen eighties or nineteen hundreds, an ambitious they
start that in it's not a good career move. In
the seventeen eighties or nineteen hundreds, an ambitious scion of
a decayed noble family desiring to conquer the world might
want to become an artillery officer. Today he wants to
work on Wall Street or at Google, even if you're
starting out from a very rough place, there or almost
certainly a dozen better things you could do to advance
yourself faster, for better money and with less effort than
joining the military. The only a peer of the US,
the only appeal the military for decades now has been
to people who really want to escape their situation, who
really felt they needed to needed to hard reboot their life,
or who are really drawn to military life out of
sheer love of it. And then the army went woke.
Wokeness is toxic to the Army, not just because of
the values clashed with most ordinary recruits, but it places
front and center the entire dynamic that makes the military
such an awful career path. Not only you are young
men not enticed to join the military out of the
knowledge that they're wasting years not getting a university degree,
or that their gender, skin color, and sexual orientation are
still going to count against them even once they're out.
They're not having it declared to them that they'll suffer
that disdain and discrimination even in the military, invariably by
some fat, university educated minority woman brought in to give
a diversity lecture. Even whilst you're serving the US government,
it's going to rub your face and the fact that
it's undermining you and your career, and it's somehow a
mystery the army can't recruit. The US military has taken
close to half of the people it takes, it took
in the nineteen eighties, and it still can't find anyone. Meanwhile,
it's not uncommon to hear in various forums open talk
from active military that if the US military were used
in in an international war against dissent by the Trump
and proletariat, they desert. Indeed, anonymous leaked military wargaming projects
something close to a fifty percent desertion desertion rate if
any major in any major civil conflict, and there's nothing
to be done to save it. There's no will to
double or triple pays to reflect GDP or what similar
effort could be could get a person in the US economy,
don't enlist, go fracking or Alaskan crab fishing. There's no
political will to undo the bizarre system of racial and
sexual patronage that benefits everyone except the productive class that
drives the US economy. And there's no way any of
the elite would recreate a world where military service was
a better guarantee of job prospects and financial security than
a university degree. So America's effective recruitment capacity and civil
feeling will continue to collapse even as Americans hate each
other and their government even more. You think recruit capacity
is bad, now, wait till they imprison Trump. So that
was a lot. I mean, the thing about old Twitter,
when you only had one hundred and forty characters and
then two hundred and eighty and now you can do
things like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, that's uh, I mean, there's a lot there.
Speaker 1: So when I guess it starts off talking about just
the whole idea that there was a time when going
into the military basically brought about gave you in society
like some kind of you know something, a lot more
than people clapping for you at the airport. It was
like you were in basically another class, like a separate class.
Is that how you read history?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And and this is something this is a
theme that is recurrent in writings and you know, autobiographies
things like this by war fighters since since the beginning, right,
I mean you see some of this sentiment. I mean
this is this has been around since like since the Greeks,
since the Romans before that. And this is something I mean,
a lot of things have gone off the rails in
the last fifty years in America, right, there's a lot
of inversion of reality in the way things are kind
of postured at this point is pretty out of touch
with a lot of a lot of how life was
for you know, thousands of years before it and the
ability like if you went off and you did you know,
if you did did your duty, that that was kind
of how a man might earn his make his bones,
so to speak. Right, Like, this was something that young
men traditionally we're tasked with your country needs you. You
go do your thing, You fight the fight, take the pain,
make the sacrifices, carry the weight, come home and then
you know, then you intern into that phase of your
life where you have a have a family or career
or things like that. And that's where a lot of
a lot of you know, masculine social standing at least
comes from. Right, this is a This is something that
a lot of a lot of people have written, you know,
volumes about some of these things. Are there are prerequisites
for this, right like this, this is not something that
you can force into existence through HR policies and diversity
initiatives and things like this. Okay, there's just no way
to kind of defy reality on this, right Like, you
can't fight a war against reality because you're going to lose.
And when you try to create a reality that relies
on a military that is too small, things too highly
of itself, it's staffed by people who, for whatever reason,
you know, just just don't have the ethos needed to
be successful in a martial sense, Eventually you're going to
run into some very serious problems. And this is kind
of what the US military is is teetering on currently.
Some of these cracks started to show through in Gwatt, Vietnam, Korea.
I mean, hasn't been like a great sixty seventy years
for the US military all told, you know what I mean,
Like the decisiveness.
Speaker 3: Of the kinnectic ability.
Speaker 2: Exceeds the will to victory by the political class and
by the upper middle class. You know, this tweet does
a good job of discussing the social dynamics in Vietnam,
where if you had just enough money to get into college,
you didn't have to actually go serve. And if you
did not have enough money to get into college, then
you know, you had to go fight in the jungles
in Vietnam and then get told that you know, you're
an asshole for doing that when you came back, right, Like,
this is kind of signals at the beginning of the
end in a genuine erosion and in some of the
basic necessities to create like an effective martial society.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And people might hear that and say, well, you know,
the United States is it's not not a martial society.
And that's basically not not not quite true, right Like
most of the famous martial societies throughout history. If you
look at the Romans, the Greeks, these were civilizations that
a largely like the like the Greeks particularly relied on
like the concept of like government government by consent, right, Like,
these were free men who would fight, and this is
a concept that I mean, I mean this goes back,
like Xenophon writes about this, like this is not.
Speaker 3: You know, something novel.
Speaker 2: This is a prerequisite and this is something that you know,
Ben Franklin talks about, you know, this idea like the
catral Kulak mentions. He says implicit in nineteenth and twentieth
century militarism is a version of every soldier at citizen.
This is a Thomas Jefferson quote, right, and it was
expressed of course, you know the French Revolution, but it
predates that as well. So I mean even the founders
of the country understood that, you know, soldiers should be
every soldier is a citizen. Every citizen is a soldier.
This this goes deeper than just having to put on
a uniform and go be involved in some type of fighting.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is referencing like a deeper responsibility that citizens have
to their communities, their cities, their states, their countries, that
people have to be bought in this type of thing,
and that these sacrifices are ones that are you know,
people are not sent to on a whim or for
corrupt purposes or things like that. That this is a
responsibility that soldiers have to fight, and that leaders have
to send soldiers into worthy battles. And so the military
for a long time, you know this, this isn't just
something that happened in.
Speaker 3: The last three years.
Speaker 2: I mean for a long time, the military is kind
of the US military at least has been deviating and
kind of getting off path with that. And so I
think this is a lot of a lot of this
is correctly identifying like the outcome of the problem, which
now is that nobody wants to serve at least nowhere
near the number of people that you know, have wanted
to serve in previous generations. Right, And this is not
something that you can fix.
Speaker 3: Easily, right.
Speaker 2: It takes a long time and a lot of cultural
effort to create a society that can function with like
a legitimate markle, you know sense, and it doesn't take
very long to destroy it, unfortunately, And you know, we've
largely eroded, uh, you know, thousands of years Western military
tradition in the past, you know, four or five decades,
just in the interest of you know, every basically everything
that comes out of the Civil Rights Act and equality
movements and things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just noticed something that he misspelled. Freed corps
and I've pronounced it pronounced it improperly. Well before we
get any more into the so, I wanted to ask you,
but I mean you joined after nine to eleven, what
was the uh, what was the culture then? I mean
you were in infantry eighty second and everything. I assuming,
I'm assuming the culture would have been a lot different
than other divisions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is uh, it's it's funny.
Sometimes I talked to like younger guys, uh, and we
kind of live in a it's kind of a mixed
bag because like I mean, you you remember, America was
a different country in two thousand. I mean in our
you know, in our lifetimes, this country has really really
changed and in a lot of ways. And so when
you when you tell people, the young guys, you know,
like yeah, you know nine to eleven happened. You know
a lot of us, you know, we were in high
school and you know, I saw this unfold and it
was like cool, like the the you know, there's a war,
so you you joined the army when there's war if
you're teenage male, you know, because that's uh, you know,
that's what people have been doing since like before Christ
was on earth. So you know, it's not like a
you know, it's kind of a no brainer. And when
you explain that, you know, to someone you know who's eighteen,
nineteen years old today, it's like, well, why, like, you know,
why would you do that. There's a lot of sentiment
that like, you know, that's just silly.
Speaker 3: Why would antybody do this?
Speaker 2: Because there's this eroded sense with young people ultimately that
you know, America is bad, everything sucks, the founding origins
of America, the founding origins of Western culture, that all
this stuff is bad and it's all fruit from Employison tree.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: Why would you inconvenience yourself? Why would you put yourself
in harm's way? Why would you do anything other than
like vape and play Xbox and you know, work at Chipotle.
You know, this is this is like a foreign concept
to a lot of young people, and it's it's unfortunate
because the sentiment was not like that, you know, twenty
years ago. But the government has very effectively been able
to squander all of that goodwill. I mean, if you
look at g Watt and the outcomes post nine to eleven,
you know, you and I we have considerably fewer freedoms
today than we did in the year you know, two thousand, right,
I mean.
Speaker 1: In well two thousand was I mean, in nineteen ninety two,
Francis Fukuyama says, you know, it's the end of history.
Liberalism is one, right, and yeah, so everybody throughout the
nineties is living like liberalism is one. Everything's great. You
hear people like Bill Maher, and you hear people like
the Weinstein's, you know, they just want to go back
to the nineties because that was that was the end
of history. That was that was the most perfect society
we could ever have. And then all of a sudden,
you know, terrorist attacks basically turn that on their head, right,
And I mean you weren't ready for that. People were asleep.
I mean most people slept. I slept through the nineties.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, I was born
in the mid eighties, so I was a kid through
a lot of it, you know. I mean I wasn't
you know, you're a little older than I am, but
I wasn't quite looked into it as you would be,
you know. But the sentiment largely, you know, in the
year two thousand was just a like, you know, it's naive,
but it's like, well, why would anyone want to attack America?
Like that seems crazy? You know, what are we doing anybody?
And you know, I know it's naive, but you remember,
you know, I'm like fifteen sixteen at the time, and
that's the sentiment that's you know, common, is like, you know,
I'm just trying to go to class and like, you know,
do shit with my friends, like why or these guys
flying planes into the buildings in our cities and things
like this, and so a lot of this, you know,
really a lot of this good will, and there was
a lot of unity post nine to eleven. You know,
there was a lot more like an overt sense of
patriotism and all these types of things, and that it
really just kind of vanished over the twenty years that
followed because we entered into you know, ground conflicts in
Iraq and Afghanistan where things really didn't go great for
a long time. And you know, especially in Afghanistan. I
mean we know now that there was like a good
stretch of that time where there was no actual plan
at all. Right, I mean, if you look at the
Afghanistian papers from a year or two ago, now, they've
been out. You know, it was just kind of like, well,
you guys just kind of stay over there, you know,
and don't don't pause any bad press. And there was
no like clear strategic goal at all. And obviously we
saw you know, this culminates with people falling out of
cargo planes and you know some you know, geriatric guy
with dementia making weird commentary about it, and you know,
hitting civilians with missiles and you know, a dozen soldiers
getting killed things like that. So it really ended, you know, poorly.
And in that time, the only thing that changed for
most Americans was that everything became more expensive. The government
was able to you know, read every text message and
record every phone call and scan every email, and.
Speaker 3: You know, the.
Speaker 2: Institutions like this. This obviously, this was a the institutional
capture by the left didn't start with nine to eleven.
Speaker 3: But the g Watt era.
Speaker 2: Really was kind of the cherry on top of you know,
this endeavor that had been unfolding for a long time.
And now we're at a point where you know, I mean,
I'm not saying anything crazy here, right, but you could
get fired for talking this way and mixed a company, right,
And this is the society that we live in where
you have to worry about losing your four oh one
K because you don't want like a cross dressing pedophile
shaking his ass in front of your kids. And that's
what we got out of g Watt, right like that.
So when you when you put that all together, you
you look at this and you go, Okay, well, yeah,
why why would anyone fight? Right, like, why why would
you go sign up in the year of twenty twenty three,
especially in the wake of g Watt And he mentions,
so there's a there's a couple of things he mentions
here about the like the compensation, the pay structure, things
like that in the military. I will take a slight
issue with that. Not I'm not saying the military gets
paid well, but it's a little different arrangement than just
like a normal job.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: It's true that like a private might make less than
thirty thousand dollars a year. However, there's no real cost
of living.
Speaker 3: Like if you're.
Speaker 2: Unattached eighteen nineteen year old guy, yeah you don't. Your
salary is not anything considerable, but you have no cost
of living because you're you're your housing is taken care of, right,
you live in barracks for free, and your health insurance
is taken care of because you're a soldier and you
don't have a water bill or power bill those types
of things, and a lot of your food costs are
also offset. So you know you're not you're not like wealthy,
but there's you know, you're not really like budgeting, right,
Like all your core expenses are taking care of and
for a lot of guys, the money that you make
is just kind of like spending money.
Speaker 3: So when you.
Speaker 2: Like in fairness, when you stack that up, it's not.
Speaker 3: Like all in.
Speaker 2: Your compensation is halfway all right, I mean it's not
it's not great.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying that.
Speaker 2: Like, you know, this is where people go to get wealthy,
but you're not necessarily like like working poor. Right, So
the question of whether this advance is your career I
think goes deeper than just like just your yearly salary.
It goes into what does this do?
Speaker 3: Right? Like what is.
Speaker 2: What does college do for you? Like showing getting a
four year degree does not necessarily indicate that you're an
expert at anything, and in fact, usually it's it's not
a reliable indicator of that at all.
Speaker 3: But it does.
Speaker 2: Show that you have four years where you can play
the game, go through the song and dance. You have
enough social skills that you can navigate this for four
years without getting kicked out of something, and then you
basically know how to play nice. Right, Like, you get
out of a four year degree, and unless you're in
something that's very very high tier, like a good STEM
program or something. I mean, getting out of a four
year degree with like a general like a degree in
business or something just means that you're able to kind
of interact socially as needed and you're able to do
some degree of independent work, you know, So that in
and of itself is and what opens doors for you.
The social proof, the proof of concept is what opens
doors for you. And in an era where like military
service might count for something, that's why it was important
to be in the military, right it was like, okay,
when I was eighteen to whenever twenty two, twenty five,
you know, I successfully served in the military, and that
shows that socially, like this is a safe bet to
offer this person a job or position of responsibility or
you know that they might be a little bit more
favorable choice than somebody who stayed at home during you know,
any event. And this isn't specific to g WY. This
is you know, service in the military historically. So it
is true, like the dollar amount of compensation is not
anything crazy, but you're still relatively taken care of. It's
just that it doesn't open the same types of doors
for you now that it may have sixty years ago,
one hundred years ago, five hundred years ago. So that's
you know, some of the some of the change. And
so he mentions increasing like the pay and that's not
a bad thing like that, that that's not going to hurt, right,
But that in and of it's I don't think is
the heart of the matter. I don't think that's the
essence of why the US military has this credibility problem
at the moment and it has this recruiting crisis at
the moment.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you this, ask your opinion on this.
Prussia was always described as a military with a government.
Is it getting to the point that a modern state
is going to be able to exist without with only
having a all volunteer force?
Speaker 2: If you ask the US Army War College, the answer
is no. Right, Like they actually published an article this
week I read it this morning, and they're of course
discussing this in the context of the Ukraine Russia conflict,
and it's couched in the idea of a large scale
combat operation. And the answer basically is no. They're they're
saying that if you look at you know, twenty years
of g WATT produced roughly fifty thousand casualties between dead
and injured, and you know this, this would be like
two weeks of large scale combat operations against a Western army.
And there's very low levels in the what's called the
ir ARTS Individual Ready Reserve.
Speaker 3: This is.
Speaker 2: I'll give it just a quick background for anyone, anyone
who's not familiar with this. The shortest term of service
that you can have for the military is eight years.
Now you don't have to do all eight years on
active duty. So, for example, if you go down to
the recruiter's office and you sign up for a four
year contract in the US Army, what you're actually signing
up for is four years of active duty and four
years of what's called ir R or Individual Ready Reserve,
which means that you get out of the army and
you can go to work. You don't go you don't
wear a uniform, you're you're basically a normal civilian. However,
they can always call you and say, hey, Bud, you
got to come back, and they can do that for
four years after you got out right, and it's you'll
hear it referred to as a backdoor draft sometimes, and
this was a common thing. You saw a lot of
this during Iraq and Afghanistan, where guys would do a tour,
they would get out of the military. Nine months later,
they'd get a letter in the mail that says, hey,
you're surprised you're coming back, and you need to go
report here and you're going to Afghanistan for.
Speaker 3: Nine months or something.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's not popular, of course, people don't
like dealing with it. But the IRR is like our
last reserve.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: You have active duty and then you have like National
Garden Reserve units, and then you have ir over, which
is kind of like calling up the guys who are
now out of shape and you know, binge drinking and
not wanting to go back, but they still technically have
this obligation. So the number of soldiers in IRR is
also historically low. So not only is the military way off,
I mean you're talking like five percent for some recent
years in their recruiting goals, but the IRR levels are
also very low, and so they're saying that, like, yeah,
if we're in a large scale combat operation where the
military is looking at fifty thousand casualties in a short
period of time, we don't have the ability to sustain
that for any length of time. We cannot put fresh
bodies through trade off fast enough to get them up
to the line, and so this is basically just not
something that we could really do right now.
Speaker 3: And again this is in.
Speaker 2: The context of like a war similar to the Ukraine
and Russia conflict. The War College paper there they refer
to this as a strategic inflection point, if I'm remembering
it correctly, meaning that like their opinion is that the
military should look at this, take a deep assessment and say, well,
hang on, we might have like a systemic problem here
where we really couldn't play in a war like this
right now. And you know, there's a lot of factors
that go into that. The military really really is extraordinarily small, Okay,
a lot of people. You know, there's there's like a
trillion memes about the American defense budget, and you know
how the government just gives everything to the military and
blah blah blah. But the reality is that that's that's
not true, like that that's not the case. So in
the tweet, he says there's one point three million total
US military personnel, and that's accurate. There's three hundred and
thirty million people in the country.
Speaker 3: Okay, So.
Speaker 2: Right away, just at face value, that you know, is
not anything impressive. But when you drill down on the
numbers of this as of twenty twenty one, and these
numbers haven't shifted significantly since then. But as of twenty
twenty one, the active duty Army force was about four
hundred eighty two thousand people and the active duty Marine
Corps force was about one hundred and eighty thousand people. Okay,
so you're talking about less than seven hundred thousand people
that are active duty Army or Marine Corps. Now, the
Navy has about three hundred and fifty thousand people, same
with the National Guard, a little bit less for Air
Force active duty. But the important thing to understand here
is it of Army active duty and marine active duty,
only only about fifteen percent of that force is infantry. Okay,
and infantry is you know, that's your your trigger pullers.
That's the guys who those are frontline combat jobs. Okay,
so you're talking you're actually really not talking about a
large number at all. And I looked into this. As
of twenty nineteen, the number of soldiers between the rank
of E one and E four, so that's your lower
enlisted soldiers. That's just grunts.
Speaker 3: Hey.
Speaker 2: The number of grunts that's in the army is the
mos is an eleven bravo. So the number of eleven
B E one through E four, can you guess it's
nineteen twenty people. Right, So there's there's three hundred and
thirty million people in America and there's twenty thousand young guys.
Speaker 3: With rifles who are just regular g I joes.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: I mean, so the money that goes into the government's budget,
of course is large, but even that is not what
people think it is compared to the overall federal budget. Okay,
But like I said, I mean, you're twenty thousand lower
enlisted guys. What's that going to do you against a
place like China.
Speaker 1: I think I've heard that China has China could mobilize
quickly almost almost as many soldiers as as our population.
Speaker 2: Right, I'm sure you know. Now the you know, the
Chinese question, you know, so a little outside of the scope,
but there's some things to consider. I mean, they don't
have the force projection ability, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not scared of China, China. I'm believing
I'm so well studied in China that like the only
thing about China that I ever worry about is manufacturing
and trade things like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker 2: But the you know, my point with this is that
you can't expect twenty thousand guys to deal with a
near peer adversary, right like having having twenty thousand guys
who are low level grunts. You can't control the globe
with that, right, you just can't. And it's obvious that
America's foreign policy is to control the globe, right, Like,
I'm not you know, I'm not saying that's good or bad.
I'm just saying that's the reality of the situation, is that.
Speaker 1: That's that's not hyperbole. That is their goal, right right.
Speaker 2: So, now, of course, you know this is twenty thousand
lower enlisted guys. There's you know, you know, well above
that in terms of NCOs and officers to matchments and
things like that. So even still, if you're looking at
four hundred and eighty two thousand active duty Army and
one hundred one hundred and eighty thousand active duty Marines
and fifteen percent of that is infantry, you're still kind
of in like the low six figures of actual grunts, right,
And this is not a large number compared a to
our population, but b to our goals in terms of
force projection.
Speaker 3: Right, it's just not enough to get the job done.
Speaker 2: When you're looking at a conflict similar to Ukraine in Russia.
Right now, Notice I'm not talking about the Navy in this,
I'm not talking about the Air Force, I'm not talking
about the Air National Guard, you know, fucking space force,
talking about active duty army and infantry like combat arms,
because this is kind of the context of today's you know,
concern is fighting a war similar to Ukraine versus Russia,
where you know, you're seeing kind of a return to
almost more traditional inventional style ground war between uniformed armies
who are having a hard time getting the one up
on each other, and a lot of this just turns
into guys shooting each other from five feet away in trenches.
You're going to need more than you know, one hundred
hundred and ten thousand dollars if you're going to win
a war like that and still project force around the globe.
And so this is a reality that the US is
at least some parts of the government are starting to
look at and go, Okay, that's not good, right, Like
this is this is actually a pretty serious problem, and
the way they're trying to fix it is the worst
possible way, like he mentions, he says, and then the
army went woke. Wokeness is toxic to the army, not
just because of the values clash with most order and recruits,
but it places front and center of the entire dynamic
that makes the military such an awful career path.
Speaker 3: Okay, so he's.
Speaker 2: Mostly correct on this, And as with anything else that
the federal government does, their solution for it, at least
in recent years, is to just make it woke, make
it more diverse, Get some people who shouldn't be there
in there, right, Like, let's get some women in pregnancy
flight too its and pregnancy body armor. Let's get some
some cross dressers out in the trenches. Like these are
things that only an idiot would think is a good idea,
or someone who would like to, you know, dismantle Western
civilization or both. You know, it's not mutually exclusive, but
these are bad ideas. These are these are This will
not rejuvenate the military. This will not improve the situation
with recruiting because almost definitionally it cannot Okay, there's just
there's no way that this can happen. And I remember,
you know, one of the big points of contention when
I was getting out of the army. You know, we
we did this deployment. We were there for twelve months
in Iraq, and then shortly before we came home, we
got told it's actually gonna be fifteen months. We had
ninety days added on. Some of you remember that it's
the troop surge in two thousands, and so what happens
with this is, you know a lot of guys on
these three four year contracts, you're you're gonna be getting
out soon, right Like if you if you sign a
three or four year agreement and it takes you, you
know a few months to get through basic training and
jump school and things like that. You spend a little
time in your unit, you go to JARRTC, you overseas
for fifteen months. You know, there's actually not that much
time left on your contract when you come home, and
especially when you get extended. So we had a lot
of guys that were stop lost what it's referred to
as again some of some of you who are old
enough to remember that from Gwatt. That means that you're
you're in the military and your contract expires while you're
like overseas. So you're in Iraq and it's the last
day that you were technically supposed to be in the army,
but surprised you're going to be there until the unit
comes back, and then you're gonna be there for a
few months while you're out processing and clearing your unit
and all this type of thing. And so, you know,
we get back from Iraq and the Army. At the time,
it was called PLDC. It's I'm sure the name has
changed since then, but it's it's basically there is the
Professional Leadership Development Course or the Warriors Leadership Course. It's
it's it's the training course that you go to when
you become an n c O, when you become a sergeant,
and every time you break up in the Army, I
don't know if it's like this in other branches. I
would imagine that it's similar. But in the Army, every
time you you gain a stripe, once you're an n
c O, there's.
Speaker 3: Some type of school that you go to.
Speaker 2: When I was in it was PLDC, binoc Anoch and
so on and so forth. So like you go from
a sergeant to a staff sergeant and start up for
a class, so on and so and uh, this is
like a professional course. And so I I had become
an n c O in Iraq, I'd basically taken a
promotion in country, and so I came home. I was
getting out of the army in like four or five months,
and you know, we all got called down to like
the Italian classroom, and you know, you get a new start,
a major and a new battalion commander. They're shot out
of a cannon about all right, this is what we're
doing before the next deployment. You know, everybody's going to
PLDC blah blah blah, and you know, nobody a lot
of the people in the room really shouldn't go to
this because they're they're not even supposed to be there
that day, right or they're they're in the process of
like trying to like buy a house back home, or
you know, see their kids or all this type of stuff.
You know, remember, these are guys who just spent fifteen
months in like you know, actual combat during some of
the worst times in Iraq. So you get home and
you you know, you kind of have.
Speaker 3: Shit to do.
Speaker 2: And this is only a three week course, but you
know you're there all day. You stay at PLDC. You're
not you're not home at night, and it's like a
farm where you know, basically like non combat overweight female
soldiers go to like give like whiteboard classes about you know,
how to how to perform like a near ambush or
things like that. And these are the things that make
you hate the army, right because it's like, well, like
this is actually my job. I'm in the infantry. I
don't need the chick from the supply unit trying to
explain to us how to conduct an ambush. But that's
what the army wants done because to the Army, you
need to be having you know, women in these spaces
or taking these these leadership roles, right, and these are
like resume bullet points on these people's n coors. And
so the whole thing is like a it's kind of
a gode rop because it's obvious that they don't care
about doing what's right, which is, you know, these guys
who got held over or are getting out soon probably
need a little bit of time to get like their
affairs straight before they transition out to you know, back
to the civilian life. You know, they're really focused on
getting these bullet points for resumes and for the sake
of diversity, and you know, this type of thing. And
so again, this isn't this is in two thousand and eight,
so this was kind of before the stuff got as
bad as it was now, Like this is this has
been a problem. It's been brewing in the military for
a long time, right, Like this is something that has
reduced combat efficacy for for everyone, and a lot of
a lot of the things that the army has done
are moving in the wrong direction.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: You don't fix recruiting for a military by making it
easier or by making it, you know, a more inclusive
environment for people who can't run as fast, or can't
do as many push ups, or can't shoot their rifles
as well. Right, this is the exact opposite of how
you would develop a military. In fact, it's precisely how
you would ruin a military, which is the most frustrating
part of this because it's to people who have like
any degree of common sense, of course, you would say, well, yeah,
that would be a ridiculous thing to do to the army, Like, well,
why would you want a military that prioritizes fitting in
the guys who don't run as fast, or don't shoot
as well, or can't do as many push ups, or
emotionally you're not rugged, or you know, or just in
it for the money, or any of these things, right Like,
these are bad ideas when you're trying to create a military,
and especially if you're trying if culturally what you're trying
to do is create a military that is relatively small,
that can do more, that can punch above its weight,
right Like, if you're building a Chinese military, then yeah,
you know, you just need any person who's you know,
old enough to eat a fucking, you know, crab out
of a mud puddle can be in the military. But
this is not the case if what you're trying to
do is carry on like a Western tradition of martial policy,
right it doesn't make sense. And this is the position
that the army currently finds itself in, which is that
the people you would want to be in the military
are not going to join the military because they have
almost deliberately ruined the military by turning it into a
hr department that has machine guns instead of a force
that's really good at killing a lot of bad guys.
Speaker 1: What is your take on people's opinion that one of
the reasons, and it's mentioned here about turning the military
inside on on the citizenry here, what's your opinion on,
you know, the whole bio lens and take that basically,
you're not really staffing the military with the the best people,
but people that you know will be loyal to your regime,
the trannies and the freaks, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the the obviously, for any leader who plans to
stay in office, the military being politically reliable is uh,
you know, vital, right like this, this is not something
that is negotiable if if you're the Biden administration, or
not even just the Biden administration, but any administration that
has an agenda that is deeply an incisively counter to
long held cultural beliefs of the people over whom you
are governing. You kind of have to get rid of
the true believers from the military and bring in.
Speaker 3: People who will be loyal to you.
Speaker 2: Right like this, This is like I mentioned earlier. You
get free healthcare in the military, and that's really great
for people who have like anxiety problems, exchange genders.
Speaker 3: They you know, have.
Speaker 2: You know, pet problems that you know constantly require attention
from some type of medical professional like these are. These
are high maintenance individuals who are a drain on society,
do not contribute anything, especially in a martial purpose, but
they will vote for you no matter what, right like
if you if you look at like like the trans
thing is a perfect example of this, because you know,
you're you're seeing ads, you're seeing recruiting ads on social
media from the army of these pudgy, overweight, like weird
fetish you know, guys who are too old to be
there talking about how whatever they're really women or they transit,
you know, the whole nine yards, and how everyone in
their unit loves them, and you know, the army is
a great place to be if you're like them. And
you know, of course, because the government will pay to
either remove their penis or put a fake penis on them,
and then it will give them a waiver that says
you never have to deploy into combat, right like the
current arrangement for trans people in the militaries, you basically
have a permanent waiver system where you're non deployable, you know,
which is insane. Like if you if you went back
at any point in history and you told, you know,
Caesar Alexander or anybody that you need to you need
to hire some guys who can't fight, and they're also
going to be a freak show that needs to move
with your frontline troops everywhere they go. You know, they
just would have cut your head off and for wasting
their time. Like, this is an insane concept. I mean,
it is obvious that that's the end goal, right, but
I don't think like like America and America specifically is
kind of a unique example where if you're doing a
good job as a head of state, right like, if
you're a president who even even somewhat takes into account
the broader populations well being, you really don't have to
worry about the military not being politically reliable because traditionally
people who serve in the military in America are relatively
extremely patriotic and loyal to the concept of civilian governments
governance of a military.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: This is again this is this is kind of a
it's unique to America in this day and age, but
it's not a unique concept to Western military. Is if
you're doing what you should be doing as a leader,
you don't really have to worry about the military, you know,
as a threat.
Speaker 3: Right, But if.
Speaker 2: You're acting, if if you were dealing with impropriety, corruption,
you're going against you know, the the broader sentiment of
the productive elements of society, then of course you you
have a real problem. And so yeah, I mean there
is some element of that. But the the real problem,
of course is that we have enemies like potentially China,
potentially Russia, potentially any number of places where if we
want to maintain this what is perceived as like a
US hegemony on things, we cannot continue at this rate. Right,
Like the military cannot miss its recruiting goals by twenty
five percent every year, the military cannot fill it's lower
and like its officer corps with people who can't see combat,
people who do not want to deploy, people who do.
Speaker 3: Not believe.
Speaker 2: In these military concepts. These are people who you know,
these belong in the HR department at like Chase Bank.
These people don't belong in like an artillery unit, right,
and so you can only get so much like, yeah,
maybe they're a little bit more politically reliable to you,
but the second you have an actual engagement with a
modern military, you are going to pay for this one
hundred times over. And it's not something that you're guaranteed
to come back from, Like there's no do overs with
this stuff most of the time.
Speaker 3: So it's I think that is.
Speaker 2: What they're doing, but they're really really running a risk,
like an existential risk by doing it.
Speaker 1: It really seems like if that were to happen, and
I hope it's an unlikely scenario that there would be
enough people who you know, like yourself, who actually know
how to handle themselves for lack of a better term,
no fed posting, that could just turn an attack on
people like that and just put them down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's you know, I mean, these things it's not
you know, it's just not fun to talk about. Like
I don't like you know, talking this way, you know
what I mean, Like this is.
Speaker 1: Not no we just I mean, come on, we know
we've talked about this, we've hung out, all we want
to do. We're like literally people that want to grow.
Speaker 3: In a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: You know, this this is the Yeah, it's brutal and
this this stuff, uh, you know where he's talking about.
You know, obviously there's there's a distance sentive. He says
that not only are young men inc ue to join
the military out of knowledge that they're wasting years or
basically that you know, their genders can color sexual orientation
things like this, it's going to be used against them.
This is like, this is true, but it's uniquely true
in a military sense, right, Like the the people who
join the military, especially people who join the military voluntarily,
do not want to be made to feel, uh feel
like they are or are perceived as criminals or like
victims of some type of broader system.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is just this is just a simple truth about
the psychology of this. No one, you know, no one
wants to do anything that involves some type of competitive achievement.
You know, if this is going to be the sentiment, right, like,
no one would play high school football if they got
perceived as bad guys who are like somehow victims of
you know, their own flawed way of thinking. Right, this
is the opposite of the culture you have to foster
if you do want to have a military that's effective.
And it's somewhat ironic because one of the timeless themes
of famous militaries through history is actually egalitarianism.
Speaker 3: Like this is.
Speaker 2: It sounds counter to any right wing thought, but this
is this is kind of a lot of people listening,
you've probably heard the expression, especially if they were in
the service, the expression of never above you, never below you,
always beside you, and that that's kind of a mantra
in a lot of units and a lot of military thought,
which is that everyone who's there is equal, right, and
it's it's the old cliche about being equally worthless and
everybody you know equally sucks and all this type of stuff.
But there's a lot of truth to this because in
a military context, the idea of egalitarianism is one where
everyone is equally contributing and equally sacrificing, rather than equally
consuming something or equally receiving a perk or a handout. Right,
military egalitarianism involves a equal willingness to shoulder a burden
a right to suffer. And it's very different from the
liberal thought about egalitarianism as a right to enjoy privilege
or a right to be included in something. Okay, So
like this is kind of like this is why it's
a bad idea to give every want a right to vote, right,
because not everyone's going to see it as a duty,
you know what I mean. This is a theme that
comes up in philosophy since stay one when you're talking
about something like democracy is why would you give everyone
a right to vote if they're not invested in you know,
good faith outcomes and some type of fiduciary obligation or
civic obligation. Right, So, military egalitarianism.
Speaker 3: Is critical.
Speaker 2: You have to create an environment, culture, and a spree
de corps that it tindts on some type of egalitarianism
in a fighting unit, or you're not going to be
effective because people will not fight right like an army fights,
you know, on its heart.
Speaker 3: So there is no.
Speaker 2: There's no way to create a rifle company that works
if you're telling people it The lazy people, the slow people,
the weaklings, the people who can't shoot, the people who
are too dumb to read a map. These are the
people that you have to take with you. You cannot
create that environment and create a rifle company that is effective.
Speaker 3: Okay. And that's not.
Speaker 2: Again, that's not new. This is something that you see
written about in warfare for thousands of years. Okay, Like
if you like, I went through because I was thinking
about the stay, I grabbed carnage and culture.
Speaker 3: And here's two quotes.
Speaker 2: And this is interesting, and I highlighted these because there's
such a long span of time between this. Okay, So
from carnage and culture, that's victory David Hanson's book, for
David Hanson's book, and he's talking about, like the March
of the ten thousand and Xenophon. We're out of the
Mediterranean with philosophers and students of rhetoric, march and file
alongside cutthroats to crash headlong into enemy flush where outs
would every man under arms feel equal to anyone else
in the army, or at least see himself as free
and in control of his own destiny. And he's talking
about the fact that this Greek mercenary army was composed
of low lifes and scumbags, mixed in with people from
noble families and aristocratic backgrounds, and that they were all
committed to one another with a sense of disciplined egalitarianism
and exclusivity, and they were able to basically fight their
way back from halfway across the world through hostile territory
the whole time. Now, pair of this, you have Steven
Ambrose in the introduction to Parachute Infantry. That's David Kenyon
Webster's book. He's describing him. Webster he was a literature
major at Harvard, but in World War Two he joined
the infantry, the one hundred first Airborne, and Steven Ambrose
says Webster was a man of books and libraries, a
reader and a writer, thrown into an intimate and life
dependent relationship with ill educated hillbillies, southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen,
and other typical paratrooper enlisted men. In short, with a
group of men with whom he had nothing in common.
He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in
civilian life, he just would not have known them. Yet
it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster
found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense
of identification with others. Now, these are about twenty four
hundred years apart, and you're seeing this theme recurring, this
concept that people from different backgrounds and different walks of
life can be effective. These are both militaries that won decisively.
They can be effective if they view themselves as contributing
equally in part of like this tight knit unit where
everyone belongs because everyone can carry their weight.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Married to this is this idea that what you're doing
is a challenge to yourself, right, like the desire to
and you know other people have written about this. This
is also a sentiment that I share because when nine
to eleven happened, I mean, if I'm being honest, a
big draw of this wasn't necessarily like, oh man, nine
to eleven happened, I'm going to join the military because
just because of nine to eleven, you know, a lot
of that was, Hey, do I have what it takes
to fight in a war like this? Can I shoulder
the same burden? A lot of people who came before
me have shouldered, right, And I just happened to be
at the right age in a country, you know, on
Earth it was in that situation, and so I joined
and a lot of guys that were in the Army
appeel two varying degrees. Similar to this, David Blavia writes
about this. I mean, he says, we endure for two reasons. First,
there's a nobility and purpose in our lives. Are America's
warrior class. We protect and we avenge. Second, every moment
in the infantry as a test. If we measure up
to the worst days such as this one, it proves
we stand to breed apart from all other men. This
is the concept that you see time and time again.
This has to be there. This cannot be in a
military and still be a top tier military that is
better than other militaries in the world. Right, There's just
no way around this stuff. It's baked in. You can't
change the recipe. There's just no way around it.
Speaker 3: Right. So you see this, like, if you look.
Speaker 2: At the military and you look at the jobs in
the military, the army might have like a like a
twenty five miss from its recruiting goals, But there are
units in the army that don't have this problem. Right, Like,
there's never a shortage of guys who want to go
be a Navy seal. There's never a shortage of guys
who want to go to be an army ranger.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense? Like, do you understand where I'm
coming from with that? Like there's like, there's always going
to be guys.
Speaker 2: You will always have enough guys in a Western society,
especially in a country if you're running it well, who
want to step up and take on some type of challenge.
But if what you're offering, if you're what you're watering
down in the military, is not having to take a
PT test, you know, a bunch of walking stomachs, just
bumbling around through the day vaping and buying dodge chargers,
then you're going to lose. Right, you have to offer
young people, and specifically young men, a challenge to themselves
worthy purpose to pursue some environment that's going to be
dependent on meritocracy, like genuine meritocracy. Uh, and it will
foster camaraderie. And this has to be something that they
enter into voluntarily, right like this, This is where I
disagree with the concept of you know, draft and conscription
and things like this. I understand that as like a
civilization saving policy, but all other things being equal, it's
best to avoid that type of thing in my opinion,
because you want people who want to be there, right,
you have to take people who want to be there,
and you have to give them a challenge, and they
have to be led well, and they have to have
a purpose. And these are things that the military is
not doing right now and has been doing less and
less and less of for honesty for generation. Yeah, it
seems that if the only thing that the soldiers are
bonding over is their their trends status or their gender
status something like that, sure that's not going to there's
going to be no cohesion when it comes to actually
pulling a trigger, I mean, or going into battle together.
Speaker 1: I mean, what there's what's the camaraderie there? I mean,
most of these people are have bought into a trend
and they've made this trend their identity.
Speaker 2: Right, so that goes out the window, right exactly, And
there's you know, I don't know. I mean, like I said,
I got to the army in two thousand and eight,
so it's basically ancient history. I'm sure that there are
quality young people in the army today. I'm sure that
there are still on of guys who are very capable,
but you know, I think it's less and less and
I think that the environment as a whole is less
and less conducive to those types of things. And you
can only this can only be degraded so far before
it's not effective at all. Right, Like, this isn't something
that's just you know, ironically, but it's binary. You can't
be non binary, right, Like the military is either functioning. Specifically,
the infantry is either functioning or it's not.
Speaker 3: Right, it's either.
Speaker 2: Going to win in a kinetic engagement or it's not.
And once you cross a line where there's x percentage
of people who don't really want to be there or
x percentage of people who can't actually hack it, right, Like,
even even on a good day, this is not a
job that just anybody can do, right, Like it it's
not the most difficult thing in the world. But you know,
if you're eighteen, like I mean when I joined, you know,
you have to be clean. You have to be able
to graduate high school.
Speaker 3: You can't have a criminal record.
Speaker 2: You know, for the most part, you can't you know,
have like face tattoos or you know, you got to
pass a drug test. All you know you have physically,
you can't have any real ailments. And you know, to
get into better units. You have to be you know,
be physically capable. So even on a good day, this
is not something like just any seventeen eight year old
guy is going to be able to jump into. Like
the percentage of young people who are been ertically eligible
for military services is just not high, right, everyone's overweight
or sick mentally some type of unwell, either either fake
or imagined, and so's it's really not great. And I'm
sure you know, you know, there's probably some zoomers out
there that are that are really good at being in
the infantry, Okay, and I hope there are, because there's
not a lot of them, right, Like we discussed, there's
about twenty thousand of these guys. But it doesn't take
a lot to fuck that up. Like it doesn't take
a lot of like being in a rifle platoon for
the rifle platoon to stop working as a rifle platoon. Okay,
it takes like exactly one. And it's the same for
you know, trans people, people who can't meet the pet standards,
people who cognitively can't meet the minimum requirements, you know.
I mean this is like it's it's kind of a
trope that the Infantry's you know, the crayon eaters, and
it's it's just grunts and stuff like that. And some
of that's true, Like some of the dumbest motherfuckers I've
ever met in my life were in the infantry with me. However,
you know a lot of a lot of the smartest
people I've ever met were too. And you kind of
have to have a couple of brain cells to rub
together to be effective, especially in a leadership position. And
this is just this is just something that you're you're
really really poisoning the well by reducing these standards, flooding
these places with people who shouldn't be there. And and
I don't even mean that in like.
Speaker 3: An edgy.
Speaker 2: Like Mimi kind of way about people who shouldn't be there.
They could go do something else, right, I'm not saying
that to be a dick. I'm saying that because that's
just the reality. Like, you cannot win a war if
your commanding officer is a thirty six year old, overweight transperson.
Speaker 3: You can't do it. I'm sorry, it's not possible. That
will not happen. There's just no way around it. Okay.
Speaker 2: And so again I'm not saying that to sound like
a doomer or be blackpilled, or say this is like
an irreversible problem, or like like it's over something like that.
These are just realities that have to be confronted. And
if you don't confront these realities as a culture and
as a society, as a military, you will stop being effective.
The end, you will you will lose, Like this is
what will happen, Like you will lose. It's going to
take some type of crushing defeat for people to sober
up and realize that, you know, this isn't nerve right,
Like when you send guys into some type of kinetic engagement,
Like if you send a platoon and do ground combat
and the pl is like a cludgy, twenty nine year
old guy with a diaper fetish, you know you're gonna
have thirty eight like American dudes getting dragged through the
streets because they're all going to be dead. And that's
what it's going to take to wake the country up
from this stuff. There's just no way around it. And
again I don't I don't like talking that way. I mean,
I have kids, I have a son who's interested in
the army. I mean, this is this is what comes
natural to boys, this is not the way I want
the things to be. It just it just kind of
is though, right, And if we don't as a society
wake up to this stuff and say, hey, look like
you can even keep the woke stuff, right, you could.
You could keep this stuff in the university, because you
could keep the stuff in the HR departments. You cannot
let it come into the military. The parts that are
in the military need to be remote from the military.
This needs to be something that's understood as hey, look,
this is just not where this stuff goes now. I
don't know if that's possible socially, right, Like, the people
who believe these things believe that these are real concerns, right,
Like there are true believers, like in the Biden administration
and the broader progressive movement a lot of this. There
are a lot of people there who, you know, they're
just doing this at a corruption and they know that
if they get people who are politically reliable and they
head up certain agendas, then they're going to you know,
get a board seat on an NGO somewhere or like
a sinecure job or something like that. Those people are
less dangerous and the people who are genuine believers, Like
there are people in positions of power who actually think
that it would be really good to have a bunch
of fat asses and weirdos on a rifle company. And
those are the people that they need to be removed
from power.
Speaker 3: And this thing needs to.
Speaker 2: Be reversed or out, you know, God forbid when the
day comes, like, and it will come, you can't have
you know, a dominant country right and never have someone step.
Speaker 3: Off to check you on that.
Speaker 2: That's that's the history of the world, Like there's no
way around it, Like that day will come and we
have to be prepared for that eventuality, and we're not
on track to face it right now.
Speaker 1: Let's end it right there, because I don't think we're
going to come up with an answer for it other
than the obvious. And I think you pretty much hit
the points that need to be hit about this. And
that's why I asked you to come on, because I
know that this is something you you follow. You mean,
you're reading war college, you're reading war college stuff for
just just to research for yourself. So I couldn't think
of a better person. And plus you know we know
each other, so thank you, thank you. I appreciate that
and always a pleasure. Yeah, and quickly remind everybody about
end block Press again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's e N B l O C Press p
R E S S N block press dot com again.
It's weekly newsletter, occasional podcast. Go sign up, subscribe. All right, man,
I appreciate it, Thank you very much, Lee, for sure,