- Sort of a "super boy scouts." A red-state only thing, but it would work. The idea is that we pay the price, as a society, of having warriors---train them from birth.
Yeah, wasn't that tried already?
This would work. It is a modified version of the old Spartan idea.
Has anyone ever seen the recruiting commercials/ads for the British Army? They don't try to sugar coat things like our army does. In their ads you see people getting dirty, under intense pressure, cold, tired, wet, etc. I don't think that they are having trouble recruiting people with this.
Our Army, has ads/commercials that are such obvious BS and PC filled crap that it's pretty understandable why we are having problems.
Paragraphs are our friends, even to army recruits. :)
The problem in not marketing. It is the constant anti-military drivel from the MSM, the entertainment industry, the Dems, and PC teachers/profs.
With all that anti-military sentiment, it's a wonder anybody signs up at all.
There are all the vet organizations but they don't do much outreach to promoting new warriors. There are many more patriot parents that never served that aren't welcomed into the vet organizations. Every football program has a booster club.
The services generally don't have any time for warrior promoters who for one reason or another didn't serve. It is a mistake and a blown opportunity. Look at the number of hunters in the U.S., far more than all the vets put together. Our recruiters need to get on the ball if they want the best and most family supported recruits.
When my family served we always reached out to unattached kids and made them feel like part of our Marine family. Very powerful recruiting and those recruits with a support base always perform better.
Interesting, I first thought of Sparta and that this was probably going to be a kooky tin-foil helmet article.
However, the idea has merit. As I recall, all male citizens were expected to be part of our countries militia by our founding fathers. A little physical training, orienteering, shooting and maybe some kung fu classes in school wouldnt hurt anything and it would let some kids find out that they really like that sort of thing. They should tie it back in with the concepts of duty to your county and maybe have them read the constitution, if that isnt banned by some judge somewhere. It would also benifit the police departments and other law enforcement. I was always facinated at how many new recurits and officers I met in the military that had never even touched a gun prior to signing up. Its sad really.
I hate to point this out, but the Marines dont have nearly the problems the Army does with their quotas, mostly because they have the "maybe you can be one of us" attitude vs. "Army of one???" Of course we have fewer seats to fill, so I'll give them that.
As if gubmint skoolz weren't indoctrinating our kids enough; now they want to start training them to kill and die for the state while they're still in diapers.
Yeah, wasn't that tried already?
Yeah, wasn't that tried already?
shelton, I think you found the true agenda of this noob
Anything else is just wishful thinking.
One technique the Army uses is the fantasy sale (formerly “Be all you can be,” now “An Army of One”) to get enough people in the door. However, such a fantasy approach either insults the recruits’ intelligence and makes them appear gullible to their peers, or sets them up for disillusionment if they actually believe the Recruiting Command’s ad copy.
The Navy and Air Force attract recruits with a high-tech emphasis, implying that they will learn something useful for their post-military careers. This does not insult their intelligence and actually receives more respect from their peers. Navy and Air Force officers cultivate the image of involvement in science, physics and engineering, representing applied academic achievement in uniform.
The Army and the Marines, however, do not have similar latitude in the scientific and academic disciplines taught in schools today. Where people are both gun-shy and lawsuit-shy, you will not find a curriculum in the arts, history or disciplines of war. The absence of martial learning in schools today leaves a vacuum filled by disordered mutations of the instinct: gangs, lone shooters, clique fights or contact sports.
Army recruiting’s premise is that the service must select and turn civilian-oriented recruits into a new soldiers within a year. The most that can be made of this fast food approach has been made, and is remarkable as far as it goes. And yet this quick turnaround is a minimalist approach to the profession of “warriorcraft” that our society does not use in other professions such as medicine, law or ministry. There has to be a better way than crippling our warriors with a mixed dedication that treats their profession as a “paraprofession.”
The young person contemplating military training and service out of high school faces a rapid personal revolution lacking the depth of a gradual steeling over time. A martial tradition beginning in early childhood would change that. While our society expects a military that will quickly and efficiently sharpen its recruits into formidable warriors, it expects these warriors to have civil rights awareness, cultural sensitivity and creative individuality to customize democracy projects all over the neocon map. How can this happen in public schools and universities from which military tradition and the art of war are estranged?
There is no psychological trick, hat change, badge, moniker or advertising campaign that can improve recruiting. The only way to improve Army recruiting is to improve the quality of recruits over the long term. It can only happen if recruiting dies and martial training and tradition rises in U.S. public elementary school curricula.
The qualities and skills of warriors should be built up gradually over time if our soldiers and Marines are to fulfill the nearly superhuman expectations society imposes: to kill their enemies while equipping the relatives and neighbors among whom their enemies live with the tools and mindset of democracy.
Each of the armed services ought to use recruiting and research funds to pay accomplished former armed service members to train children in key areas that will develop their warrior talents: physical and mental toughening, orienteering, martial arts, marksmanship, swimming, outdoor and survival skills, negotiating terrain, mechanical skills, endurance, field medicine, problem-solving workshops and the like.
The best approach would establish integrated martial art, sports and academic programs in elementary schools and take martial curricula out of the storefront sales paradigm (like military recruiting) and into a prep school curriculum. Such an emphasis would not be just for developing future commissioned officers, but for enlisted soldiers as well. Young students would benefit from a samurai-like program in service to constitutional democracy.
Such a program would provide a much larger contingent of military-ready recruits and candidates when they come of age without having to put them through a sudden assembly-line process after high school, which actually forces the appearance of fanaticism that civilian sensitivities ironically create. At any time, we would be able to raise a credible military force out of our peacetime population.
The warrior prep programs should eclipse JROTC programs. They would not indoctrinate the children to think in terms of “officer” or “enlisted,” but would emphasize mastery of hands-on leadership and teamwork in martial skills before rank ever became an issue. The goal and reward would be mastery of martial skills, not attainment of rank. The virtues of warrior traditions would deepen the warrior profession beyond a corporate career concept in more and more children over time.
American culture must help our children replace the toy-store fixation with plastic war heroes and enable in them the empowering realization that they can defend their people, their country and their freedoms. Men are not plastic and life is no game. Yet for some interests, it has been profitable to treat them like plastic game pieces at expense to life and limb.
As our population ages and immigration increases, we will need a mainstream warrior cohort integrated into civilian schooling that blends new immigrants with established citizens dedicated to the common defense of our nation. We cannot afford to allow ourselves to develop into a nerdy, yuppie techno-class that is protected, fed and clothed by a perpetual immigrant force of people who must take lower pay simply because they are newer and less educated.
To accept the status quo is to increasingly make military recruiting just another commercial industry, and that is an art that democracy cannot afford to make mercenary and factional: the art of war.
When we old farts were kids, we played army with toy guns, cap guns, (even BB guns), dirt clod grenades and slushballs, and practiced sneaking up on each other.
Schoolyard differences were settled fisticuffs, but when the fight was over, the winner helped the loser up.
The average feisty 7 year old was more of a warrior than a lot of the feminized or videogamed kids in high school today.
Counseling and conflict resolution and all the candy assed crap is turning a large number of our children into a nation of wimps. Now parents call their lawyer if little Johnny comes home with a bloody nose.
That said, there are some tough kids out there, who don't (as a rule) grow up in Yuppie Mansionettes, who go to schools which are far more brutal then the pantywaist ideals. They may be tough, but are their surrogate institutions a warrior culture, or simply one of exploiting those weaker?
What we need is a midline between brutality and pantywaists, where the concept of Honor is taught, and Chivalry is renewed, at least as much as modern paradigms will permit.
Feminist Doctrine not only does not understand, as a rule, diddley squat about young men and being a warrior, but has generally sought to eliminate the warrior culture from our young men.
Those who are aggressive enough are not channeled into programs which permit them to work off that vigor, but are feminized or drugged instead of disciplined. Our very culture has become one which teaches many to take advantage of those less capable, (and that not face to face), rather than defend them.
It is not about esteem, but respect, self respect, respect for others, respect for authority, and the respect of your community for doing tough tasks, and doing them well.
IMHO, the Boy Scouts were then a great organization, and may still be, but they suffer the onslaught of a society which belittles and belabors them for everything once considered right and honorable by the mainstream.
When I was a scout, we cut down trees, wound baling twine into rope, and used those trees and that rope to build things, including a tower in a lake.
We did not need permits, we did not need an environmental impact statement, we just did. We accepted orders from those we respected, and in turn, learned respect for ourselves and others, and earned others' respect. It was great, and is something we need to get our young men back to.
Boy, do I need a pagaraph!
Living in a blue area(Los Angeles)I find it hard to believe this could be implimented, but I'm sure my view is distorted from my 15 year exposure to this pit.
A childhood filled with this type of orientation seems ideal to me; martial arts, shooting, camping, etc., like boy scouts was when I was a kid. It takes EFFORT on the part of parents these days to let a kid grow up with that rich of a childhood. Oh, that's right, it did when I was a kid too.
I really only read this thread to brag about my son going into the Army on July 12th. ;^)
On a somewhat related note--
Army ROTC is meeting its requirements comfortably. Admittedly not every cadet expects to be a warrior, and they have large numbers of medical, business, administrative types, but some have no goal other than to lead a dogface unit.
Last years numbers were 4400 commissioned with a goal of 3900 annually. Some were assigned to other than active assignments. My son is eager to "get to the front" in spite of the constant pc make love not war drumbeat and frankly is tired of biding his time in ROTC.