Current Events > Military is now recruiting soldiers to fight in a war from before they were born

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/verabergengruen/afghanistan-recruit-war-endless-911-sept-11

Today, for the first time in history, a young American can enlist to fight in a US war that started before he or she was born.

As the war in Afghanistan enters its 18th year and the US Army falls thousands short of its recruiting goals, the Pentagon is recognizing it has to do something different to recruit an age group that does not remember 9/11 and for whom the war on terror has been background noise their entire lives. This includes rethinking some of its traditional military PR, which has unintentionally turned the corner from inspiring to morbid by highlighting that some of the young people enlisting today are taking over the same tasks in the very same places their parents fought almost a generation ago.

This has led to a strangely poignant overlap between real military press releases and the brutal satire of The Onion. A story this summer titled History Repeats: Son Follows Fathers Footsteps Into Army Service celebrated a recruit who was joining the same unit his father had previously been assigned to in Afghanistan. A few months earlier, a widely shared satirical article had been titled Soldier Excited to Take Over Fathers Old Afghanistan Patrol Route.

The grim reality was not lost on the military.

Theres a New Father and Son Served in Afghanistan Puff Piece, and Boy Is It Depressing, read the headline on Task & Purpose, a news site run by military veterans.

But this underscores a very real concern for military leaders that the cost of the US war on terror is being borne by an increasingly smaller number of families, isolated and unnoticed by the rest of the country. At the same time, the US military footprint across the globe has expanded rapidly since former president George W. Bush ordered US troops into Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom on Oct. 7, 2001. The US still has 15,000 troops in Afghanistan, but last year Americans also died in combat in places like Yemen, Niger, Syria, and Somalia, where most people back home including some members of Congress were not even aware the US was fighting.

Most Americans are only vaguely aware that were still fighting overseas, and the reason for that is that they dont have any skin in the game, retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, a former US commander in Afghanistan, told BuzzFeed News. Thats not a very healthy thing for a society, if it becomes the same 1% doing this from generation to generation while the rest is relatively oblivious.

Seven US service members have died in combat in Afghanistan this year, part of more than 2,300 Americans who have been killed there since October 2001. Nearly 21,000 have been wounded.

Theres a reason that the US Army itself promotes service as a family business. Having a relative who served in the military has long been a key indicator of whether young people will consider enlisting. Roughly 83% of young Americans who enlisted in 2015 had a family member who served in the military, and more than a third had a parent who did so, according to Defense Department data.

And that group is shrinking. More than three-quarters of adults over the age of 50 said they had an immediate family member who had served in the military, according to a Pew Research Center survey from 2011. Only a third of those ages 1829 did.

The same pattern also influences who gets to positions of leadership. A 2009 analysis of Defense Department data showed that 65% of white officers had a father who served in the military.

Its not unusual for children to follow in their parents footsteps the children of doctors and lawyers also are more likely to enter those professions but its different when that war has become the family business, said Amy Schafer, who wrote a report on the issue at the Center for a New American Security.

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"We've always been at war with East Asia."
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What is different here is that this professional inheritance has created a warrior caste, which is wielding force on behalf of a democracy while the rest of the country isnt involved, she told BuzzFeed News.

Young Americans now becoming eligible to enlist have seen primarily two portrayals of military service in their lives either the heroics of Navy SEALs taking out high-profile terrorists or soldiers coming back with post-traumatic stress disorder in films such as American Sniper or The Hurt Locker, she said. One makes all military service seem unrealistic for most, the other a terrifying ordeal that ruins lives. This increases the likelihood that those who do enlist come from families and communities where they have been exposed to a more realistic image, and the range of options, she said.

There is this huge respect and admiration for the military [in the US public], and very little real understanding, she said.

There's a lot more in the article and I know people are gonna "lolBuzzfeed" but this is a fairly level article and it's talking about real things that are happening.

This is the army article it references:
https://www.army.mil/article/206520/history_repeats_son_follows_fathers_footsteps_into_army_service

This is the Onion article:
https://local.theonion.com/soldier-excited-to-take-over-father-s-old-afghanistan-p-1819580201
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There was absolutely no reason or justification for invading Afghanistan.

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

sleepysausage posted...

There was absolutely no reason or justification for invading Afghanistan.

There was. But it's turned into a never-ending disaster.
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ChainedRedone posted...

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

It's from 1984
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UnholyMudcrab posted...

ChainedRedone posted...

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

It's from 1984

Wasn't born yet
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ChainedRedone posted...

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

It's a quote from 1984. I kept the quote original . . . the geography of it is irrelevant.
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I can't tell if this is intentional or not
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ChainedRedone posted...

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

Imagine not understanding this reference. Educate yourself, kid.
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Erm what? Didn't Obama withdraw out of Iraq and Afghanistan like, nearly a decade ago?
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0AbsoluteZero0 posted...

ChainedRedone posted...

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

Imagine not understanding this reference. Educate yourself, kid.

Like I said, wasn't born yet. I don't know anything about that year.
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M_Live posted...

How are we still warring over there? Our military is bigger than their entire population. I genuinely don't understand the end game of the Afghanistan war at all.

we've hit the end game. its called perpetual war and always a reason to keep military spending high as fuck and have special funds and contracts to weapon manufacturers and merc agencies. they got exactly what they wanted while the normies just keep paying their high taxes.
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Article doesn't surprise me. Both my parents were in the army, and I also served 10 years.

As far as Afghanistan goes, it's a lost cause. Taliban controls majority of the country. There will always be fighting going on over there. There is strategic value to keeping troops over there, but not at the amount that are currently there.

M_Live posted...

How are we still warring over there? Our military is bigger than their entire population. I genuinely don't understand the end game of the Afghanistan war at all.

The war is technically over. The problem is that it's still a very unstable region and there are still various terrorist/insurgent groups that remain a threat to the government, which is why forces remain there. It's not a very large contingency though - in 2017 there were a little over 13,700 NATO forces, almost 7,000 of which were US, in Afghanistan. A lot of it's just peacekeeping and also conducting training for the local military and police forces.

saspa posted...

Erm what? Didn't Obama withdraw out of Iraq and Afghanistan like, nearly a decade ago?

No. NATO forces peaked at about 130,000 in 2011 (less than a decade ago) and Obama in 2014 did plan on withdrawing the vast majority of forces and leaving a small force but that didn't work out.
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Republicans are small government unless you're talking about putting the country trillions of dollars in debt in order to over fund the military and intelligence services because they want to blow up brown kids in order to stop terrorists from blowing up bum fuck Kansas that no one has heard of.
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Yikes
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It's kind of weird they talk about Afghanistan specifically when we still have a massive amount of forces stationed in South Korea which is technically still at war with North Korea, and that war was over 60 years ago.
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Hexenherz posted...

M_Live posted...

How are we still warring over there? Our military is bigger than their entire population. I genuinely don't understand the end game of the Afghanistan war at all.

The war is technically over. The problem is that it's still a very unstable region and there are still various terrorist/insurgent groups that remain a threat to the government, which is why forces remain there. It's not a very large contingency though - in 2017 there were a little over 13,700 NATO forces, almost 7,000 of which were US, in Afghanistan. A lot of it's just peacekeeping and also conducting training for the local military and police forces.

saspa posted...

Erm what? Didn't Obama withdraw out of Iraq and Afghanistan like, nearly a decade ago?

No. NATO forces peaked at about 130,000 in 2011 (less than a decade ago) and Obama in 2014 did plan on withdrawing the vast majority of forces and leaving a small force but that didn't work out.

That might be what I'm remembering. Can't believe they're still over there.
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Hexenherz posted...

It's kind of weird they talk about Afghanistan specifically when we still have a massive amount of forces stationed in South Korea which is technically still at war with North Korea, and that war was over 60 years ago.

One is still an active war, the other is not. Not weird at all
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...

Am I the only one who forgot we were at war?
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If the war ever ends we'll need a history book in order to figure out what it even was about.
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I stopped reading at buzzfeed
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DevsBro posted...

...

Am I the only one who forgot we were at war?

I mean..it's not a conventional war. We're providing support for a government to fight off an insurgency.
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ChainedRedone posted...

UnholyMudcrab posted...

ChainedRedone posted...

Anarchy_Juiblex posted...

"We've always been at war with East Asia."

>Afghanistan
>East Asia

It's from 1984

Wasn't born yet

I legit laughed out loud at this trolling double down. Well played.
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Modern military service is based on lies to enrich a select few

FursonaNonGrata posted...

Modern military service is based on lies to enrich a select few

How edgy
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But I thought president bush had that big mission accomplished sign

ChainedRedone posted...

Hexenherz posted...

It's kind of weird they talk about Afghanistan specifically when we still have a massive amount of forces stationed in South Korea which is technically still at war with North Korea, and that war was over 60 years ago.

One is still an active war, the other is not. Not weird at all

There have been many, many confrontational moments since the "end" of the Korean war, and US soldiers have died since it "ended".
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wtf are we doing in afg?
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