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June 25, 2023 - Stew Peters Show
52:48
The Richard Leonard Show: Military Recruitment At An All Time Low
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We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
secret that recruitment in our military is at an all time low.
It's a major problem.
Recruiting and retention in the United States military is an issue.
Today, we are going to have a small conversation about this issue and maybe a reason for that that I didn't really identify with or think was possible, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
So stick with us.
Don't go away.
we start now.
Hey everybody, welcome here to the next episode of the Richard Leonard Show.
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I hope that everyone had a great Father's Day last week.
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Okay, so as I said in the intro, today we are discussing recruiting and retention.
It's a pretty big debacle, in my opinion.
Defense of this country is something that I think everybody should be taking quite seriously.
And I don't know that the powers that be are taking it all that serious.
And I have a really, really big surprise for you because our good friend Jason is back with us again this week.
So let's find him here.
And there he is.
Hey, Jason.
How are you, buddy?
How are you, sir?
Good.
I'm very good.
Good to see you.
Let's start off with a...
I just want to ask you a question.
When you joined the military...
Way back, what was it, 1913 or something when you joined?
Yeah, right.
Got gilded into being a cannoneer.
Folks, I don't know if you know this or not, but when Jason joined the military, his first job was to put shoes on Custer's horse.
I digress.
When you joined the military, Jason, why was it an option for you?
Why was it okay?
I mean...
People ask the question, like, hey, why did you join the military?
I feel like that's a question that doesn't really ever go anywhere because people always have a lot of options.
Why was the military an option that you chose?
Yeah, right.
I think that's the question when everybody asks it, that that's the hardest one to speak to, specifically.
Like, why did you join?
You know, is it reminiscent of all those great movies where that's kind of like the opening tag when they're talking to the funny guy in the military?
Like, I didn't have a lot going on, or I need new teeth.
You know, some BS like that.
Yes.
But, you know...
When I started to think about it, obviously my father was in.
He was a 28-year career guy on the officer side.
So I was familiar.
Didn't really understand what he really had done.
So it wasn't something I was totally in tune with.
But when I started to pay attention to the things that were going on and what I had going on in my personal life, I kind of didn't I could solidify some of the things that I felt were positive in myself, going through some type of galvanization for something that theoretically would serve a greater purpose than what I was currently doing.
And that ended up being a service in the military.
Yeah.
And so it's only fair now that I answer the same question.
You know, for me, It was kind of just an issue of college, right?
I had went away to college.
I didn't do so hot.
And I ran out of a way to pay for it.
Some other members of my family, some other people that were close to me had their family members in the service and it was something that was talked about to me quite a few times and I kind of was at a place where it just made a lot of sense.
9-11 was not too far in the past at this point because I joined in 2002.
But to be honest, the reason why I joined was because I needed a way to finish college.
And I didn't have parents that made enough money to pay for it, but they made too much money for me to get financial aid.
And I had not done well enough in school to rely on my athletic ability to pay for school because I didn't get the grades.
So that's why I joined.
And it was only after I joined and was getting through basic training and advanced training that the soldier in me, I guess you can say, came out and the patriotic side and this calling to serve came out.
My father is a retired police officer.
So there was some service in my family.
My grandfather served in World War II. So there was some of that, but I didn't know a whole lot about that, right?
I never really inquired up until that point in my life.
But that kind of stuff came out of me at that point.
And so, you know, fast forward now to 2023.
I never thought when I joined the service that in 2023 that this is where I'd be, that I've been retired.
I've been through all the experiences I've been through.
I certainly never thought that I'd be a talking head on a small show like this and that all these people would give two shits about what I got to say about it.
But I'm happy.
I'm super pumped and I'm humbled by the opportunity to be here.
But Jason, let me ask you this now.
Knowing what you know now about your military service And just the military in general.
If you could rewind time back to when you joined, would you do it again?
To quote one of my favorite shows, that'd be a hard pass.
I think it would.
I don't think I would do it now.
None of the goals or the things that I got that were positive from the military have any bearing on that.
It's more so just the things that have gone on in this country that I would have a very hard time kind of putting myself in that position again for the direction that we're going.
Interesting.
Well, I got to be honest, bro.
I wasn't expecting that answer.
But hey, it is what it is, right?
And so here is the bridge, right, to the whole issue of recruitment and retention.
I guess let me follow it up with this question.
Why do you think...
That our recruitment numbers are so low.
Like, all time low.
Like, let me throw a statistic at you quick, I found.
And this came out, let me just get it here.
This came out yesterday.
Just yesterday.
On Saturday.
It says here that the Department of Defense is struggling with recruitment.
A recent poll conducted showed that only 9% of young people were inclined to serve.
The most interesting reason cited by 57% of those who took the survey were emotional and psychological problems after completing their service, and half were concerned about physical problems.
Now, why would you think that these young people are concerned about mental health and physical health issues and they're only 16, 17 years old?
It's actually one of the strangest answers that I could ever have imagined.
That seems to me that the veteran community on a whole and the perception of the youth of our society are probably seeing us through a pretty specific lens.
Hmm.
I mean, I don't...
Do you...
I mean...
The VA certainly has a hard time taking care of us, right?
Well, I'd say.
You know, I mean, it's a difficult task.
We're all broken shitbirds, and we've got all sorts of problems, and everybody's different, and everything is difficult, and I get that, but the fact that Those feelings that we had, typically that was always something amongst the veteran community that we understood to be true.
That the VA was difficult, they were going to do things this way, and in certain aspects that were absolutely wonderful.
But these weren't things that were very widely known outside of the system until, you know, the supernatural growth of veterans that they created.
How many events do we have right now in this country?
I think it was just over 16 million.
Give or take a few hundred thousand maybe.
If you think about that, obviously that's a hell of a sounding board in comparison to wars past.
I know I've never looked at how many veterans came out of the Vietnam conflict or the war or World War II, Korea, etc., etc., but I have a feeling that those numbers pale in comparison to 16 million.
So, clearly, that's a lot of people.
That's a lot of information.
That's a lot of personal connections to veterans that maybe were, you know, like, what do they call it, the five degrees of Kevin Bacon?
Yes.
Right?
Well, before 9-11, it was the five degrees of veteran.
You know, you had that crazy, you know, that buddy of yours that had the crazy great uncle, or he had this, or he had that.
And I think now it's more commonplace to have a veteran.
And so not only are you hearing stories on the news about, you know, veterans dying in these lines at the VA hospital, which I, you know, I don't think we don't hear that headline now, but certainly we have, you know, in the national media.
But now you're starting, you know, there's a greater frequency of those stories being told at home, you know, in the community that people live in, where everybody knows somebody.
That has, you know, has something that's going on and maybe their experience isn't completely positive.
So that's certainly going to warp somebody's perspective.
But to hear that as one of the concerns for their service, that's shocking.
Yeah, and I agree with that.
But I think that there's also more, right?
Because back in the early 2000s when I joined, You know, it was widely known, the debacle that was Vietnam and the way that those veterans were treated.
And I believe, although I don't know as much about it, especially back then, how the Gulf War veterans were treated and things like that.
There was still a draw, right?
There was still a draw for young people to join the military.
And there was still like this inherent call to service.
And maybe a lot of it was generational, right?
From Vietnam and then the children of the Vietnam veterans decided to join.
And then, you know, the generation that was our generation decided to join.
And then maybe it just carried on from there.
But I also...
Go ahead.
You've got to attribute it to those 1980s swag badasses.
That was the greatest drip in United States military, period.
Those were the best uniforms.
That was the time where G.I. Joe was hyper-popular.
I mean, these things were all done by design in our country.
There's no question about it.
So it's easy to get excited about something that's like that.
But I also think, I didn't mean to...
But there was a particular amount of national pride in being an American that drove more people to get excited about the idea of service.
I think now they throw around the term nationalism in a negative context.
But to be proud of where you're from, I mean...
It's a pretty important piece to want to become a part of the service connected with keeping that thing alive.
I don't think your father would have become a police officer if he hadn't believed in the community of the police that he saw and the communities and how they responded to him, would they?
You're absolutely right.
I mean, if you asked him today why he chose to be a St.
Paul police officer, I can guarantee you a thousand percent.
That his answer would be, well, that's the community I grew up in and I love that place.
And so I wanted to see it be as great as it was when I grew up there.
You know, my dad lives by these words, don't ever forget where you came from.
And so for him, policing the city of St.
Paul where he grew up and his family grew up and all the memories he had and everything he did there, it was super important to him.
And he spent most of his life protecting and serving in that community.
And it was super important to him.
And so...
I think that that type of, like you said, I mean, G.I. Joe was a huge thing.
I never thought of that.
But I mean, I must have had a thousand of them, you know?
And when we played outside, whether it was with sticks or fake guns, we were playing war, and we had little platoons, and we were all kinds of stuff, right?
Like, being a soldier was something that was super cool.
Well, it was idolized.
It was elevated in our society far more than it is now.
Now it's looked upon like, oh, you didn't have shit going on that was positive, so you became, you joined the military.
It was like a place of last resort.
When we were growing up, Military members were members of the society that were looked up to.
You know, they didn't need to be active in the streets.
They weren't, you know, sometimes the reserve component would go out and help fight a flood or, you know, be there when the nation was in need at home.
But on a whole, the soldier, the marine, the airman, you see those dudes walking around in their uniforms?
That was an impressive, amazing thing.
Yes.
Yes, and now we get to more of current day and, you know, like I was telling you offline, I think that if we look at the decline of our society from The Great Depression even to now and the way that,
I mean, the entitlement and the leniency and just there's no consequences for actions and we can question authority and, you know, I mean, just all this stuff.
Why would anybody who has a moral compass want to join an organization to defend and support the government That doesn't fall within the parameters of that moral compass that they hold.
I don't know.
There's just so much crap going on and nobody trusts the government.
If I don't trust you, I'm not fighting for you.
Right.
I don't know, man.
I don't know that this should be any surprise to anybody.
That our recruitment numbers are so low, and it seems like when this comes up, the very tiny bit of mainstream media that I watch or see, anytime I ever see or hear about this recruiting and retention stuff, or if you overhear somebody out in the community talking about it, it seems like such a head-scratcher.
Well, if you don't trust the people that are sending you into harm's way, Or sending us into harm's way?
Or sending our soldiers, our sons and our daughters and our brothers and sisters into harm's way?
Why in God's name would anybody join it?
It would seem an awful foolish endeavor.
I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory.
And I believe that as a society, our collective moral compass has just become so degraded that there's just no...
I don't know, man.
It's very scary to me to think about where we might be in 10 years when it comes to the defense of this country.
Right.
Well, I don't know where the rank numbers are coming in at, like what type of percentages were coming up shy.
But it's not dissimilar to corporate America.
And I remember when I was more involved in corporate America and I would see numbers and I would see HR and they would look at things certain ways.
It's really succeeded by changing the datum that are included.
And so, even if we're seeing recruiting and retention numbers that are dwindling, I question if those are based upon the old metrics or the new metrics.
I mean, you can change the way that we talk about inflation.
What's to say you're not changing the number?
So if you needed to have, you know, say a million troops in boots, period, that was the game, and you were starting to come up 15, 20% shy, it's pretty easy to say, well, instead of a million, we only need 800,000, or we only need 900,000.
Well, now we're only missing the mark by 5%.
The numbers are never going to lie.
The people will, and the stories will be told differently.
So my gut has to tend to believe that the numbers are probably even worse than the things that we're being told.
Well, I guess I never thought that because, foolish me, I trust the government that they're at least giving us the right numbers.
And I know that's kind of a wormhole thing, but I think that's something that we need to look at.
I mean, if you're willing to take out the price of gas and food and insurance to tell me what the inflation numbers are, that aggregate, you're likely not going to tell me things about this that are even more important than inflation for the overall health of our country and our stability across the globe.
Why do you suppose that something like the size and power and stability of our military is not something that is seemingly more important?
To our higher level government officials.
When it comes up, it doesn't seem like any of them think it's a huge deal.
To me, it's a huge deal, man.
If our fighting force is diminished by 20% over five years, we're screwed, in my opinion.
Right.
Right?
Well, and again, readiness numbers.
I think things have changed considerably since we were in.
You know, they changed considerably from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
There's no question about it.
There was a big push in the 1980s for everything to go mechanized.
And maybe I'm a little bit off on the time and the frame, but that was kind of the time where they really started to dwindle the number of light infantry and move everything into mech infantry.
And you also had that iteration during the 60s where things were transitioning to the helicopter.
Obviously, the movie We Were Soldiers, one of the fantastic Mel Gibson joints out there.
The first time that that was being used and you're doing this and certainly you can do more with less.
But there has to be, I'm sure they figured that thing out, where the minimum number is, but it sure seems like if you're having a problem right now, that you need to get out in front of it and do something to stem the bleeding, because otherwise, what are you left with?
You either have to drop the standards, which they continually do, to get more and more people in, or we're going to have to go to the ultimate chain.
Back to draft system where people would have to go in and have national service.
And then if you think people are melting down now, wait till that happens.
Can you imagine what a draft would look like now?
And all these green-haired sons of bitches show up to get it cut off.
Oh, boy.
Well, I would like to do the ASVAB again.
Because if they've changed the PT test, which you and I have had discussions about it, um, passing it, failing it, doesn't really matter to me.
Um...
There are certain physical attributes that I don't think can be tested or need to be tested once a year to maintain your peak physical performance.
Certainly, you have to be able to do very particular things and everything should be specialized to that.
But if they've changed that four times, five times, what do you think the ASFAB looks like now if they're dropping those standards I mean, the standards on the ASVAB to get in, they weren't real high.
Where are they now?
Well, I guess I'm pretty ignorant about that.
Have the standards or the test itself changed?
Oh, the test itself has been all over the place.
And again, let me cite my source.
It's iFunny, so it's likely flawed, but, you know, that's where I see this stuff.
And then I'll ask, you know, I've got a couple of good friends who are still in, and I've had them tell me what these PT tests look like.
And just the sheer...
Manpower it takes to administer these tests.
I mean, you used to be able to run an entire company through a PT test in a morning.
It's like an entire day, if not a weekend event for reservists and guard guys.
Yeah, that's absolutely...
Okay, here's the thing.
I'll do like a 30-second soapbox about PT tests.
I agree that there are certain physical traits and standards that need to be obtained and sustained for...
A war fighting individual.
There are certain physical standards that need to be obtained and sustained that are substantially less for a clerk that's sitting behind a desk to make sure that I get paid at the right time, which is a very important job, not throwing shade on it at all.
But the fact that it takes Two days to run 150 people through a physical standard test is absolutely ridiculous.
Because the most important thing, in my opinion, other than your ability to shoot straight, is the size of your heart and the fight in the dog when it comes to actual combat.
And you can't measure that in a two-day event throwing shit over your shoulder, doing push-ups and running a mile and a half or whatever the hell it is.
So, you know, I mean, whatever.
They've had a whole bunch of people work on this thing and decide what's the best for the service.
But anyway, we've run out of time in the segment.
We'll be right back, folks.
Stick with us.
Hey everybody, thank you for joining us again this week.
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Hey folks, welcome back to the show here.
Short break.
Jason, when we ended the last segment, we discussed on a little PT test soapbox, but I think that we should continue on.
I think getting back to discussing this whole recruiting and retention thing, I really don't like being that guy that identifies a problem, ragging on about it without providing some kind of potential fix.
So maybe we should discuss a little bit about some ideas maybe to make it better.
Do you think that there's anything...
Do you have any ideas about how we might be able to make this recruiting thing or this retention thing a little bit better?
Because I believe that it's a pretty important issue that we get back to a place where young people are considering military service as an option for their career or even if it's just...
A four, six, or eight-year clip to get some college money or get an experience or see the world or whatever those reasons are.
Do you have any ideas, maybe?
Well, I mean, knowing that 50% of people would think about the way that veterans are treated or people post-military service by the VA for mental health or physical health, It seemed to me, and we did talk about it a little bit, but if you've got 9 million people that are actively in the VA system, clearly they're the ones that are discussing the problems.
I would work at Fixing some of those issues.
You're not going to buy your way out of it, but truly going into the veteran community and say, you know, what are the things?
And I'm sure they do that and they puncture the seal, but sometimes it's, I think you and I know this better than most, you know, with our experience with UVLC, that The answers are only as good as the questions being asked in the context in which they're being taken from somebody, right?
Yes.
So if you give a BS survey to somebody, you've got BS information coming back.
If people don't trust the person that's asking them the questions, it's like an E4 bitch session.
You're just going to get garbage.
So you have to find out why there's so much negative frequency occurring with those that are active in the vehicle.
And see if you cannot start to engage them to fix some of their problems, their issues that they're having, to start to change that conversation to let people know that, you know, in my perspective, the VA isn't the worst place on planet Earth.
It sometimes gets that reputation, but they do some pretty damn amazing things.
And we need to acknowledge that the successes that they have certainly outrun their failures, but the failures travel fast.
So, work on that.
Get that to change.
There's got to be other ideas to get people in there.
What do you think?
Well, I think that you're correct.
The idea that bad news travels faster is certainly a reality, right?
Those people that have family members that died waiting for care in line at the VA, It's certainly going to be a bigger story than somebody talking about their grandpa who had some life-saving procedure and he lived 10 years beyond when the doctor said he was going to.
Those types of things are going to be a whole lot more loud and more prevalent in the community as those stories get out.
But also, you threw out a number of 9 million.
So, as of December of 2022, the VA reported that there was 9 million veterans using VA services.
Now, I imagine that that is 9 million veterans enrolled in the VA system.
The VA budget for fiscal year 2023, I have it here on their website, is $378 billion.
That equates to about $42,000 per veteran enrolled in the system.
Now let's also remember that just because you're enrolled in the VA health care system doesn't really mean that you're using $42,000 worth of care or any of it for that matter.
For example, myself, I go to the VA just for my mental health care now.
Now that I retired from the Army and I have TRICARE, I go to civilian doctors for my physical health, but I use the VA for my mental health care.
Jason, you don't go to the VA for all your health care, right?
Yeah, I don't really go to doctors anymore, but certainly go to the VA for certain, for the things that are imperative.
But yeah, I guess I would like to also see, I'm sure there's a further breakdown of how much of that money is being spent on buildings and all those other pieces, because there's a hell of a lot that goes into owning infrastructure like the VA system itself.
And I think, you know, I mean, just looking at it on a quick hit, like $42,000 per person to get in there, that's certainly not indicative of like $42,000 worth of care.
These buildings are expensive to heat, to cool, to clean, to mow, to, you know, do monitor upkeep.
To do renovations, to bring on the most current technology that's available, like CyberKnife and these other things that they're doing.
So, you know, I know when we first kind of clipped over that number and when we talked about it, I was like, that would be alarming if it was $42,000 in just pure care.
But still, that's a hell of a lot of money.
Yeah, yes, it is a lot of money.
And you're right.
I mean, the buildings cost upkeep, you got to pay the staff, you got to pay the doctors, you know, all that stuff.
But the fact still remains that the budget is the budget.
Nine million veterans enrolled.
Whether they use the care or not, the budget is the same.
We've discussed on this show before with other guests that the budget is handed out based on enrollments.
So the more veterans that enroll in the system, whether they use the care or not, will dictate how small or big the budget becomes.
So I think that maybe some way to help with this recruitment and retention issue as it relates to the VA and the negative stigma that they have is that they have to start pinging some of these veterans and families that are having positive experiences and have that story and that narrative be louder than the negative.
And I know that somebody out there may be calling me a hypocrite because we've had a lot of negative stories about the VA on the Richard Leonard Show.
But to be honest with you folks, all of it's important, right?
I've had some pretty good interactions at the VA. I've had some good care and I've had some really shitty care at the VA. So for me, it's a double-edged sword.
But there is still, you know, we've also talked about on this show that the military has used things like drag queens, right?
You know, Jason, you and I were talking offline about the good old boy from the farm out in Nebraska, you know, and how you're not going to get the pure...
Rural American man or woman to join the military and join this culture and this way of life by playing into that bullshit.
And to be quite honest with you, those are the types of people that I feel we want in the military.
The hard-working men and women that grew up on a farm or even in the inner city that get up and go to work every day.
They understand the value of a dollar.
They understand the value of hard work.
They have some God dang integrity.
and they're just tough as nails.
Right.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
No.
We don't want...
The guy who's going to bitch about not being allowed to do something because he's mixed race or that he can't wear pink effing hair or that he's not going to be allowed to cut his dick off.
Whatever that is.
Whatever that...
I digress.
What I'm saying is that that mentality, if that's who you are, whatever.
Do you, man.
Do what you do.
But for the government or the military or the Department of Defense, whoever came up with strategies like that, That's not for this culture.
And those are not the people, in my opinion, that are the best defenders of our democracy, whatever's left of it.
They're not the best defenders of our values.
They're not the best defenders of our way of life.
And they're certainly not the best people to pick up a weapon and destroy the enemy across from us with speed and violence of action.
I mean, we see it all the time.
If there's one good thing about social media, it's that all those damn snowflakes that aren't going to do shit in the face of adversity when it really matters and bullets are flying and people are dying, they're not going to do the job.
They're not gonna.
So stop trying to be inclusive.
Inclusion is stupid.
Inclusion is, to me, inclusive is, alright, let women in the infantry.
I'm cool with that.
Let gay folks in the army.
I don't care if you're gay.
I don't care if you're a gay man or a gay woman.
I don't give a shit at all.
Can you do the job?
Can you shoot straight?
Can you do land navigation?
Are you going to get us lost?
Are you going to get us hurt?
If I get shot, Jason, can you drag my big ass to cover so that I can put a pressure dressing on my gunshot wound?
Or are you going to whine and complain because your man-built penis is going to hurt because you're exerting yourself?
We don't need that shit.
I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry.
I digress for the third time now.
But go ahead, man.
Go ahead.
But it's, you know, show me your five friends, I'll show you your future, right?
It's the people that you associate with.
It's the values that you have tend to align with the people that you gravitate towards.
Those people that you've been successful with, they're your friendship group, you know, they're your community, they're either, you know, through church or through work or any of these other organizations.
And when you have polarizing things that are occurring around you, Any of those community events, you'll tend to see a departure of the status quo central mass of the group.
When you have the things that you're talking about that can make people uncomfortable, that really you're not pandering, I know that's not the right word, but you're focusing in on a very small percentage of people to highlight,
you're going to offset The central mass that maybe doesn't align with that way of thinking and a lot of times the central mass of America like the flyover states and the blue collar workers and their kids, those are the ones that are going to join the military.
I mean, we're at a point now where I haven't seen the numbers, but the vast majority of the military is white and male.
And white males have some problems and things going on.
And culturally, there's pressure on getting less white males in corporate America and all these other places.
So is this just another kind of replacement philosophy, trash away from that demographic of people that traditionally come to the military?
Well, I don't know.
I guess that's an interesting spin.
It could be.
But, you know, Jason, I think that at the end of the day, I think that the military in general is probably one of the most diverse organizations in our country.
100%.
So, I don't know if I've ever shared with you, but on my second deployment, A very, very wonderful company commander of mine made me an EOA. And so I went through the course.
It was actually one of the coolest experiences.
It was something that I had to do for some other reasons, just because I was unable to go on some of these other trainers that we had to do.
So I kind of got stuck in this particular place, and I kind of thought, Oh, man, this is going to suck.
It was absolutely awesome to be able to be that person in that position when people did have some issues, you know, things that we could resolve internally.
And I think when I was going through, and I'll never forget his name, Master Sergeant Dorn, so I know he's not listening, but if he is, I still think about those things that you talked about.
We are absolutely, well not we because I'm out, but the military is absolutely the closest thing that we have to the fabric of America.
Period.
It is within small percentages of the actual population that's being censused every 10 years.
And it was crazy to me that we could be that close because the United States military has a draw for everyone.
And I wasn't, you know, implicating that, you know, white males are the only people going into the military.
That's absolutely not true.
But demonstratively, in percentages, that is the highest percentage of demographic in America in the military.
Absolutely.
It was one of the most amazing experiences on that deployment was being cast in that role.
I never thought of that.
The EO person being...
Not the EO person, but the military being the closest thing to the fabric of America.
That's absolutely true.
That's an interesting perspective.
Alright, so...
Before I get back on my previous soapbox because I don't want to let it go.
Let's move on.
Some other things.
So like another thing, another idea I had One thing about military service that I talk to people about, because something that's pretty interesting to me is that people often ask, if it's not the person that's considering joining, it's a family member of theirs, is about what kind of jobs should I pick out in the military.
And the one thing that I tell people a lot is to Search out and pick something that you can use in the civilian world.
And I think that there's not a lot of talk about that when folks are considering military service.
For example, if I were to rewind time and rejoin the United States Army, I would become an engineer and learn to operate heavy equipment.
I wouldn't have chosen the infantry, although I loved my time as an infantryman.
We had some good times.
I've made some amazing friends, brothers, and done some amazing stuff.
But it didn't equate to a whole lot in the civilian world.
I could have been a cop.
I could have been a bounty hunter, which is what I did.
And I wouldn't have traded that for the world either, right?
But when I joined the service, I didn't know anything about what I was gonna do.
And then also, I had the amazing opportunity to become, you know, best friends and brothers with Mr.
Stu Peters.
And I mean, that in itself was the best experience any man could ever ask for, ever.
But anyway, but those are the types of things also that I think would help for recruiting efforts, right?
Like, you don't have to join and be an infantryman.
You don't have to drive a tank.
You don't have to fly a helicopter.
There are things that you can do and learn, skills that you can learn, and experiences that you can have that can make you Very successful in the civilian world and provides you a very good life when you get out if you decide not to make it a career.
Right.
Well, I think with the way that the political climate is in this country, veterans are the easiest to politicize.
To the pros and to the cons, they can be used as the scapegoat for this or the reason for that.
And I think with watching that, it's such an easy conversation to have because people get It gets people's attention when you talk about veterans' issues.
So when you bring up that thing about civilian, excuse me, even civilian-acquired skills going into the military, so you're honing those skills that you already had on the outside.
You go in, you get even better.
You get, you know, as an engineer, you get experience on way more things than you would ever get in the civilian world, at least for opportunity of touching some, you know, different types of heavy equipment.
And so, you know, as a guard or a reservist or even, you know, maybe a two- or four-year hit, wow, what an, you know, you will get more stick time on more equipment than you would ever get a chance at in the real world, period, over a short run.
But, there are no other places on planet Earth you can get a job to drive a tank.
There's not!
Target doesn't have a tank driving division.
You know, maybe Walmart will get there.
They'll be the first ones.
But there are some amazingly unique things that you can do in the military, you know, that don't require the highest ASVAB score that you need to become a rotary wing pilot or one of those other, you know, more sexy jobs that you were talking about.
But, you know, so you could really position people to see those opportunities in whatever light you want to.
And you're hitting all of them.
Are you kidding me?
To be an infantryman?
Or a 12 bang, you know, be a 12 bang bang.
So you get a little bit of the heavy, a little bit of the light.
Like, you can do things with that.
You know, you talked about those other things.
I know what you did with it.
But that still is, you're never going to have that job anywhere else.
Not in that capacity.
And I think it's pretty awesome.
I was an engineer.
I wanted to be an infantry guy.
So you and I are living opposite lives.
Well, you know, I understand exactly what you're saying.
But what I'm saying is for that 57% of people that chose or say they would not think about joining the service because of the mental or physical injury, they don't have to go through that.
During their military service if they don't want to.
There's other things to do.
And I think that they think that way because they don't know that they can go and become a dental hygienist.
They didn't know they can do that in the Marine Corps or in the Army.
They didn't know that they can be a HR professional.
I mean, there's just so many different things that you can do To advance yourself.
For example, man, the IT careers in the military are crazy.
They offer insane bonuses, all this training and all this education and all the certifications that you pay $100,000 for.
I mean, I guess I don't know for sure, but I would imagine it's not cheap to go through all this training in the civilian world.
And you go and do it for four years.
You get all this training.
You get out and you got it all.
You haven't spent a dime.
In fact, you've made a little bit of money.
And now you're going to go make $150,000 a year because you were trained and you did it in the military.
And then if you get out with a security clearance, you do it all at a much higher level for a much higher paycheck.
And so there's the advantage, right?
And so those things, I think, are not talked about widely enough.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would agree.
And then certainly specialized skills.
The military has attorneys, doctors, dentists, quote-unquote white-collar professionals.
Every aspect that you can imagine.
I know our mutual friend, I've kind of paid attention to these other people on this paralegal issue.
And where those people operate.
And I hear so many of these paralegals were paralegals in the military.
They worked in a JAG office.
And they were able to get way more experience because of, you know, how few paralegals there were, where the four years that they spent in was almost 10 years of field time if you were in the real world.
You know, and those are things that, you know, again, you're talking about the things that you can kind of, you know, Position in a positive light for people to understand the opportunities.
If you don't have all the negatives pulling you down, I'm kind of getting excited.
Maybe I would go join again.
I don't know.
You've got to flip this one on me, bud.
Well, if they don't fix it, bro, you might get your opportunity to go back in.
I mean, we might all get our opportunity to get back in.
I'll be dragging my butthole over the pond again.
I don't think so.
I think I'll be in Maine, and I'll be on that side of Europe.
They'll give you a sock for it this time.
But anyway, folks, we've run out of time.
What a great ending to the show.
I want to thank you, as always, for joining us.
It's never a dull moment here with Mr.
Jason Allison and myself.
You guys have a great week.
If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please leave them down below.
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