The pay is low. The prestige is falling. The housing is often dilapidated and roach-infested. You move around a lot and your children constantly have to say 'goodbye' to their friends. The wars are lost and the border stands unguarded from invaders. The indoctrination is pure wokesterism, advising you that you're the bad guy and the flag you serve under is worth taking a knee. You take a vaccine known to harm young people, or else. You shower with unreconstructed transgender individuals.  You watch as your highly bemedaled top commander doesn't bother with basic military fitness regulations required of you. The consultants get their big-dollar military contracts. You? You just aren't as important.

Any surprise that military families' willingness to recommend the uniformed service to family members is dropping sharply?

Here's a report from ZeroHedge:

Substantially fewer military families would recommend uniformed service to others, a new survey by Military Family Advisory Network (MFAN) finds.  

Just 63% of surveyed service members and family members would recommend service to someone considering it. That's a big drop from just two years earlier, when 75% said they'd encourage others to join. The results released on July 14 are from a far-ranging survey of more than 8,600 people conducted in late 2021. 

The finding is an ill omen for military recruiters who are already struggling to meet their goals. The U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) says a whopping 71% of youth do not qualify for military service because of obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct and aptitude. 

Many of the problems cited by the families in the poll are age-old problems -- such as bad housing, constant moving around, and low pay.

According to ZeroHedge:

When researchers delved into the thinking of service members, veterans and family members who won't recommend military service, five top rationales surfaced: 

• Military service is hard on marriages, family relationships and relationships with children
• Military pay is too low, especially given the job's difficulty and stress
• Some military leaders are bad, corrupt, abusive and controlling
• Benefits such as health care aren't worth the challenges associated with service
• Frequent moves between duty stations and frequent overseas deployments

I think of the example of my cousin, who is a young military wife married to a Navy NCO, who has had to endure some of these conditions described in the poll and it's all very real. This year her family was ordered to move again, their third or fourth move in about ten years, from San Diego, this time to Camp Lejeune, as their nine-year-old son cried over the coming loss of his friends and their happy home. During the move, which I helped on, the moving company operator asked for a free lunch, which she would have been willing to give, except that she'd gotten an email from the military asking all military families to not serve lunches to movers, because many enlisted families were too poor to afford it, so she could not. When she made it to Camp Lejeune, where her husband was placed with a Marine unit, the housing was utterly substandard, filled with cockroaches, a terrible thing given that she'd just had a new baby who was fragile, and the family had to move to a hotel. Such are the ordinary hardships military families across the country endure with little alleviation.     

But something has changed now that we see the sharp shift downward in willingness of military families, who are the military's top recruiters, to recommend military service. The poll is likely a good proxy for military morale in general, and at least must partially explain why the military is having trouble meeting its recruitment quotas.

The clue can be found in the "bad, corrupt, abusive, and controlling" military leaders section. That sounds like a catchall for bad political leadership at the top, given that the fish stinks from the head don, which includes wokester indoctrination and force-fed vaccines.

It coincides precisely with Joe Biden taking the helm at the White House. 

That new factor is crappy leadership. Nobody, no matter what the flag, wants to serve under a bad leader whose entire cabinet and party pretty well hate the country and the men and women who defend it. They are content to lose wars. Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and others, remember, went on vacay when the Afghanistan debacle was played out and American service members -- best and brightest ones in fact -- were pointlessly killed while nobody back home was held responsible, let alone fired. Biden is losing wars, blaming others, throwing troops and all their sacrifices under the bus and expecting that no one will notice. That is a tremendous blow to the American military's prestige, casually sacrificing servicemembers' lives through incompetence, Joe Biden checking his watch as the coffins come home.

They treat servicemembers as disposable, cogs in their wokester machine to remake America in their leftist image, with zero tolerance of dissent. They're the ones dismissing service members for refusing the highly questionable COVID vaccine, which has led to the sudden deaths of many young people. They're the ones pushing transgender people with their original organs into the opposite sex showers, with zero regard for the dignity of the other service members. 

In short, they don't have servicemembers' back, as President Trump once did. To these bounders, troops are expendable, unimportant, an afterthought, fodder for social and medical experiments, and certainly not allowed to win wars, let alone celebrate.

It runs roughly parallel to the mass exodus of police officers commissioned to protect and serve cities as wokester district attorneys take over and let criminals run free. Many cities have seen huge losses in police forces based on this failure of leadership. When the leader is someone you don't want to follow, you get out.

And that brings us back to the shoddy state of the military today, where military families are warning off their sons, daughters, cousins, nephews, nieces and others to avoid the service like a bad smell. That bad smell is Joe Biden and his atrocious leadership. The troops know when they are being led by a fraud and loser and nobody wants to make the kind of monstrous sacrifices the military life requires for an establishment that hates them. That explains Joe Biden right there.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License