Recruitment for our armed forces is badly failing. We are so short of personnel in every branch, save the Marine Corps, national security is actually, not merely rhetorically, threatened.  Our allies know they can’t trust our Mummified Meat Puppet President and his handlers, and our enemies are calculating how and when best to take advantage of their incompetence, anti-americanism and cowardice. Our political and military leaders tell us Americans are too fat and sickly to qualify, so they lower standards and still can’t find enough recruits. They tell us Americans are too smart, so they lower ASVAB minimums and still can’t find enough recruits, but the problem's not because the military has gone Harvard-Faculty-Lounge woke, no sir! That’s absolutely essential, because diversity is our strength, so long as “strength” is measured by proper pronoun use rather than raw, deterring military force.

The Marine Corps is considering dropping “yes sir,” apparently because not everybody is a “sir,” unless they identify that way, of course.

One would think our military, particularly the Army, would do all it reasonably could to attract and retain personnel, sadly, as John Belushi used to say: “but noooooooo!” 

US Army M1 Abrams 105mm round laid out Desert Shield, wikimedia commons.org, public domain

Deployed U.S. Army soldiers will no longer be able to store their belongings free of charge while they are away from home, the Army Sustainment Command announced Wednesday.

A spokesman for the command, which is the primary provider of logistics support to Army units, told Military.com that it was discontinuing the use of funds to store soldiers’ vehicles and other goods while they are away for prolonged periods of time.

It was not specified whether the announcement applies to all deployment types or just to soldiers on temporary duty. 

The storage policy ended in October, but the order was not “widely distributed” to soldiers or the press, the outlet reported.

I’ll bet.

“We understand the burden this could potentially place on soldiers, and HQDA G-1 [The Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Department of the Army] is drafting policy that would enable such storage,” service spokesman Sgt. Pablo Saez said.

Wait a minute. The Army didn’t make any real effort to explain this to troops, but now they’re trying to fix what they didn’t have to revoke in the first place. Break it first when you don’t have to break it at all, then hastily try to fix it? Why is that?

That new “policy” was only mentioned after Military.com first reached out to the Army about the issue in early December, the outlet noted.

Ah. They got caught doing something counterproductive and stupid.

An internal memo from Col. Heather Carlisle, director for support operations at the Army Sustainment Command, said that the Army is not required to provide storage for its soldiers:

HQDA G1, the proponent for [storage] entitlements, recently determined that the Army would no longer support [storage] entitlements because there is no Army policy explicitly authorizing storage in support of soldiers deployed for contingency operations.

Fine; write a policy. Most of the military hauls paper rather than rifles. The tooth to tail ratio has always been low; most soldiers never see direct combat.  Our non-combat Army can handle that sort of thing. Officers have traditionally been taught the troops and mission come before their own needs. Doing something so simple for the troops, something that can only encourage recruitment and retention, would seem to be a no-brainer

So is making the military so unmilitary and unwelcoming our traditional southern and midwestern recruiting pools, with their middle-class, military family traditions, have dried up.

One thing our military has is plenty of storage space in plenty of places. Even if there is no specific, service-wide storage policy, base commanders have discretion and are normally expected to use it. How hard is it to work out a little secured storage space for the troops here and there? How hard is it to make military service a little less difficult, hopefully attracting more, and more qualified, recruits?

In our current, woke, military under the Mummified Meat Puppet Administration, apparently too hard.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor and retired police officer and high school and college English teacher.  His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.