The Armed Forces continue to have trouble meeting their recruiting goals, and reasons include not only a lack of qualified volunteers but also a general lack of interest. Lack of interest is the result of (1) "woke" policies and (2) the manner in which we have used our Armed Forces since the conclusion of the Second World War.

How can I explain this? Maybe through the use of an imaginary story like this:

Alternate History: How England Won the War of Independence with the Aid of Social Media.

Assume that YouTube and similar platforms had been around circa 1775, and our side put out this recruiting video.

The video goes into the soldier's background, which includes having "two moms" and having marched for equality. In the past, the Armed Forces have used the unifying and indeed inclusive approach of not caring about anybody's background. Everybody wears the same clothing, has roughly the same haircut, eats the same food (with choices now available for religious or dietary reasons), and is treated the same.

It would have been more to the point to omit the soldier's background completely and point out instead that, despite being just a few years (if that) out of high school, she is partly responsible for operating a Patriot Missile battery whose total cost is $1.1 billion. That's a lot of responsibility for an enlisted person, and it is the kind of experience for which intelligent employers will pay good money once she completes her enlistment.

The British, meanwhile, posted this recruiting video.

The entire Continental Army, including George Washington, resigned immediately, drank King George's health, took his shilling, and put on red coats, and the war was over.

Note also that the British video does not talk about adventure, but rather peace at home.

The same goes for this Norwegian video which concludes, "What do we want to happen? The answer is nothing; absolutely nothing."

This brings us to the other issue, namely the fact that the United States still wants to behave like an empire in the twenty-first century. We should instead take the position that we also want absolutely nothing to happen, but need to maintain a powerful military establishment in case somebody else like the Axis in 1941, and more recently al-Qaida's terrorists, behave otherwise.

The Cost of Empire

Land was once at the heart of feudal systems in which kings granted nobles land in exchange for military service. The Ottoman Empire's Timariot system was similar; the Sultan granted a Sipahi (the word comes from the same root as Sepoy) a fief in exchange for military service. Commoners rarely joined armies except as a last resort, e.g., if the alternative was starvation.

The result was that kings wielded monarchs much like pawns on a chessboard, and cared little what happened to the soldiers in question.  Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, depicted enlisted British soldiers as "the scum of the earth" although he added that the British Army often made fine fellows of them. Frederick the Great wrote similarly that soldiers were "the dregs of society" because nobody else wanted to enlist in an army.

In the Horatio Hornblower series starting Ioan Gruffudd, a spy named Wolfe enlists in the Royal Navy with one of the usual reasons; a woman with a fat belly and an angry father.

In contrast, the last thing any sailor of the East India Company wanted was to be press-ganged into the Royal Navy, and the same went for any other man with a trade or occupation.

The British writer Samuel Johnson wrote of this, "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned ... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company."

Rudyard Kipling also took issue with the manner in which the British Empire used, and then often discarded, men even in the nineteenth century. Tommy depicts how an innkeeper refused to serve men in red coats, and Shillin' a Day depicts how the Army discarded a used-up Sergeant-Major on a measly pension. The Widow at Windsor describes how British soldiers guarded the far reaches of the Empire, only to never see their homes again. In The Widow's Party, a soldier tells of how half his company was wiped out for reasons known only to his superiors.

The same can be said of the United States sending men and women to all parts of the world, again as depicted by Kipling long ago. "[Queen Victoria] sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,  From the second she opens her eyes—One million Hows, two million Wheres, And seven million Whys!"

Empires are expensive in terms of human as well as monetary costs and, unlike nineteenth-century Britain, the United States does not even get the revenues that come with an actual empire.

Harrington Emerson's Twelve Principles of Efficiency contends, in fact, that the United States' victory in the Spanish-American War was actually a defeat. "If  there had  been  no  'Maine,' there would have been no Spanish war, no war expenditure of one thousand million dollars, no Philippine problem making us an Eastern Asiatic power when we have not yet solved a dozen simple elementary problems at home, such as living wages for sweat-shop workers, lack of employment, civic honesty and cleanliness."

Our status as an Eastern Asiatic power, in fact, required us to build and maintain a two-ocean navy, and brought us into conflict with Imperial Japan forty-three years later.

The United Kingdom's possessions in that region brought them into conflict with Japan as well, and the same went for the Dutch. This does not mean Hideki Tojo and his fellow warlords had any right to do the things they did, but rather that the American, British, and Dutch Empires brought them into conflict with the warlords in question.

Today's young American men and women don't want to maintain an empire, they are like the Norwegians who are willing to serve but also hope absolutely nothing happens. They may have heard how countless men were drafted and sent to fight in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, neither of which was declared by Congress and neither of which was fought the way we fought the Second World War.

Our service members during the latter war came home to find a world of rationing, and subordination of everything to the war effort; that is, we behaved as if our nation was fighting for its existence.

Our Vietnam and Korean soldiers came home to business as usual, and doubtlessly got the impression that our government was playing a game with their lives rather than waging a real war.

None of this is to say we should not maintain the most powerful military establishment on Earth because there are unfortunately leaders in countries like Russia, communist China, Iran, and North Korea whose mentality is similar to that of Imperial Japan's, Nazi Germany's, and communist Russia's warlords. (Let us not forget Joseph Stalin's own complicity in starting the Second World War.) They understand only one language, and we must be prepared to speak it.

Our commitment to NATO must remain, although other NATO members need to carry their shares of the defense spending. We must also recognize, though, that we are either at war or we are at peace and, if we have to fight, we must fight to win as opposed to how we mismanaged Korea and Vietnam.

If our high school graduates get that kind of commitment from our society — no war unless declared by Congress or declared on us first (such as what al-Qaida did on 9/11), in which case we put our full might into the conflict — the Armed Forces should easily meet their recruiting goals.

Civis Americanus is the pen name of a contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way. He or she is remaining anonymous due to the likely prospect of being subjected to "cancel culture" for exposing the Big Lie behind Black Lives Matter.

Image: Museum of New Zealand, via Picryl // public domain