Army is a bunch of parasites on the face of the Earth. Parasites that set the rules, as any ruler turning against them will be overthrown.
Army doesn’t make any productive labor; instead, it siphons trillions of dollars making the machines intentionally designed to kill people - and puts them to use.
Society loses literally nothing without armies. They don’t “protect” you from anything but other armies, and without armies and wars and threats we could move way further as a humanity.
Don’t let anyone brainwash you into accepting this monstrosity. Army is bullying their own countries, bullying and extorting each and every one of us. They are the real enemy. And they will do everything in their power to distract you from that.
Yup. Although it’s not generally 1 per school. More like 1 per 10 schools. No different than job recruiters for any other field.
(UK here) We had some people from the “Territorial Army” (basically reserves as far as I know?) and almost immediately lost the entire attention of class. No one would pay them any attention or sign up
this is what happens when your training gives your members permanent irreversible brain damage (haha i love concussions)
The us military is a fascinating thing.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from but concussions are probably one of the plethora of shitty things that you actually aren’t exposed to during training. Concussions and TBI are common because of close contact with explosives in combat zones mostly, not in training.
Of course I’m not defending the military and their practices, I was in the Marine Corps myself, this bit is just not true though.
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I wouldn’t call it ironic. You claimed that US military training causes permanent irreversible brain damage and referenced concussions as the cause. This is just has no hard evidence to back it up. And your comment here states something that was not your original claim and has not actually been studied and peer reviewed on anything except for a few studies on mice, where those studies indicate that it’s hard to equivocate these outcomes to humans for a number of reasons. I’m not claiming that exposure to sub-concussive blasts isn’t dangerous or injuring peoples brains, it probably is but I don’t know for sure whether it does or not since it’s not actually proven. Just stating, once again, that training is not responsible for actual concussions except in rare circumstances like accidental injury, almost all of these injuries occur in actual combat. Further, a majority of US service members are never even exposed to sub-concussive blasts, so there is only a small subset which your claim would even apply to in the first place.
I’m not trying to tear down your comments or defend the US military’s practices, I just don’t think making these types of claims without legitimate proof is useful or appropriate. If I’ve missed something that proves everything I’ve said wrong I’m perfectly happy to be corrected.
i referenced concussions because they are similar, and it was also a joke, hence the fact it was put into parenthesis. That wasn’t meant to be taken straight up.
To my knowledge, there have been studies done in the military on the effects of continual and repeated sub-concussive blasts (if that’s the correct term) that show some form of damage. It’s also been said that after the results of these studies coming out with potentially bad impacts, that they were pretty quickly shut down. Not to mention i’ve seen a number of people who have been in the military as well as people who know those who have been in the military provide anecdotal evidence of it.
It’s certainly not solid evidence, but for something like a federal military, that’s pretty concerning.
This whole comment section is full of people who never served talking like they know what it’s like.
I thought you were talking about the school football players.
they also get that problem but last i checked they aren’t trained by the military so.
And how do you propose they be trained? VR?
In concussion armor. The stuff we haven’t been issuing to our troopers since the War On Terror, and they’ve been coming back by the hundreds of thousands with TBIs, for which the DVA doesn’t do squat.
There’s no such thing. You get a helmet and body armor.
I’m pretty sure there is. Families since the aughts have been buying or making cardboard inserts for standard issue to help ensure Johnny comes marching home, once it had been determined the armor issued wasn’t doing it when dealing with IEDs.
But whether good armor doesn’t exist doesn’t matter. What matters is standard issue is resulting in troops coming home permanently missing faculties for which the DVA isn’t adequately managing. So we counter-recruiters are telling them there are worse things that can happen than you coming back in a box, like you coming back in parts and your family confined to poverty and wiping your ass for the rest of your natural life.
Cardboard does absolutely nothing. And there was a small period of time in 2003 or 4 where there wasn’t enough uparmored trucks. But that’s it.
As far as the government not giving help to the TBI guys, yeah that tracks.
There were armor upgrades explicitly downvoted by congress. Then we were losing humvees to IEDs like flies to glow traps. Mechanics were attaching scrap until rhino kits came out. Not a good look.
The war on false pretenses also soured the whole ordeal. I hear our grade-schoolers coming back from American History are being taught Iraqi Freedom was revenge for the 9/11 attacks. (It wasn’t.)
Oh no. Those things were horrible. The 1/2 inch steel plate was better. And yeah I remember driving around in those things. The steel plate is why I still have legs. Eventually though the anti coalition forces just started using something called an Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP). At which point we might as well have driven dune buggies for all the good armor would do. And by eventually, I mean late 2004.
Then there were the mission restrictions for heavily armored Humvees and early MRAPs. Basically they had to stay on asphalt and couldn’t handle much in the way of curb hopping or going under bridges. We actually spent most of our second deployment in an old 1025 Humvee (the 1990’s armor that wasn’t seen as good enough) and had a much higher mission rate because we could go places other units could not.
I understand that from the outside the answer always looks like more armor, but it really isn’t. And we made a lot of vehicles that could come through a normal blast just fine, but with a dead crew from over pressure. It wasn’t until the M-ATV that we solved that problem. And that thing got made available as fast as possible. It now lives on in the JLTV.
Tl;Dr - Factory uparmored vehicles were a boondoggle sold to reassure civilians. They were less mission capable and did not prevent casualties.
Edit to add - That 9/11 Iraq myth pisses me off so much. I don’t know why we went, but it wasn’t for 9/11.
with regards to their physical health, that would be a good start probably…
A soldier that has brain damage and cannot make a good decision is not a good soldier, nor is that something we should be doing to them to begin with.
Hi I’m SSG Douchenozzle, ever had a nightmare that you can’t wake up from? With PTSD we can make that your reality.
I remember mowing the lawn at home in the early 2000s when an Army recruiter pulled up and tried to get me to sign up. We lived in a cul-de-sac, so he was clearly there for me. I was 17 at the time.
The older I get, the more creeped out I am that they showed up unsolicited and talked to me without one of my parents present.
I remember a recruiter coming up to me, trying to shame me.
“Don’t you love your country?!” He shouted. This was after 9/11 too, and being brown, I didn’t say what I wanted to say because i was 17 and was absolutely sure this guy would beat me up.
After 9/11 I had people telling me to look less Muslim so I wouldn’t be targeted by crazy people. At the time, being brown and having a beard made you Muslim, which in turn made you a terrorist.
When I was in high school, during the last 3 months of the school year … I forget if they were the Army or the Marines, but they had a table with a display and two guys in the hallway right outside the cafeteria.
That waa back when the coolest phone you could have was a Motorola Razr and computers still had mice with rubber balls instead of lasers… MySpace era. So they just set up in the most highly foot trafficked area of the school.
…optical mice are way older than Razr phones and Myspace
You are technically correct but id say optical mice were not exactly common generally in non collegiate school settings, or general consumer or general office use surpassing the popularity of the older mice till the late 00s, though of course there will be exceptions basically depending on how wealthy an area is.
the first Razr came out in 2004. Facebook, the thing that killed MySpace, required a coledge.edu email until 2006. Apple was still selling the Puck mouse in 2000, and Logitech introduced the first laser-powered mouse the MX 1000 in 2004. The death of myspace the track ball mouse and the heyday of the Razr phone all defiantly overlapped in the mid 2000s.
Same, except it was one guy and the coolest phone you could get was a Nokia brick. It was a super poor school so no one had one.
I very much remember wanting to get the limited edition phone that they actually made, an actual working phone that was pretty darn close to the one the characters used in the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies, haha.
/Then I would be cool/ rofl.
EDIT: Remember when people would actually clip songs or sounds and had to manually make them your ring or msg tone?
Nowadays everyone just pays for them.
You can still do a custom tone and what not, without paying, at least on android, but nobody seems to do that anymore.
You can do it on iPhone too, and I still do. Yeah, I know, I’m antiquated.
I like to set my default ringtone to silence, and then give known contacts a real sound for calls AND texts. I’ve been doing this for about ten years and the peace of it is fantastic. I didn’t wait for Apple to do it for me, I just created a 2 second .wav of silence and then jumped through the hoops to get it on the phone as a ringtone and then set it to default. The very few times I’ve missed a first time contact that I actually wanted to hear from is nothing compared to the mountains of unwanted shit I’ve missed.
But there’s a catch. Now, whenever I blow away the OS of an old device, I have to manually re-import my SilentRing.m4r since the devices are all still connected to my Apple ID – it doesn’t matter that my iPhone ring is silent if my iPad starts ringing anyway, lol.
Easy enough to do, though. I think Apple gives you the option of a default silent ring in the OS now, but for anyone who is using an older iOS or just wants to try it:
https://www.howtogeek.com/248489/how-to-add-custom-ringtones-to-your-iphone/
“Hey, cool, were friends now, but seriously how you gonna get health insurance or pay for college? Sure would be a shame if…”
I wasn’t going to join anyway, but the military recruiter who came to my school in the 90s ensured I wouldn’t enlist.
He ended literally ended every phrase or clause with “'n stuff.” And I do mean literally. Every phrase or clause.
It went like this:
“If you wanna join the army 'n stuff, you gotta get fit 'n stuff because basic training ain’t easy 'n stuff but if you start getting fit now, you’ll do fine 'n stuff.”
For 45 fucking minutes.
Wait till you learn about places with conscription.
It’s creepy that they’re allowed to text children without their express consent. Assuming that this is a real text exchange and that OOP didn’t wilfully give the recruiter their number earlier.
This is Facebook messenger or instagram, either way public profiles
Not really any better. Soliciting (presumably) high school students via their phone or via social media is fucked up.
Point being the text exchange doesn’t require consent, as the profiles are publicly accessible. Nothing to do with whether it’s right/wrong.
The comment you responded to said it was “creepy”, not that it wasn’t allowed. That it’s allowed doesn’t make it any less messed up, and looking to argue semantics in this discussion and divert it onto trivialities just paints you as sympathetic to the practice or actively looking to aid it.
So, exactly what you’re doing right now?
Calling out your bs diversionary response. This one too. And at this point I will stop engaging you and recommend everyone else do so as well, as you have illustrated wonderfully that you’re not interested in actually discussing anything meaningful.
Not that it matters too much but it looks like Instagram or Facebook direct message
When I was a senior in high school back in the 2000’s I got multiple cold calls from Army recruiters. I have no doubt that they’ve moved on to texting, and that this is legitimate.
Yep. Cold calls, emails, texts, whatever they could get their hands on all through my senior year in high school and at least my first two years of college. Not to mention their tables in the high school cafeteria, at robotics competitions, my engineering university’s job fairs. Don’t remember how I got them off my back, I might have just aged out of their main target cohort, but my mom likes to talk about how she told them she was pregnant (because she was lol) and they never contacted her again. Do with that information what you will.
So they’re old enough to decide to join the military but not old enough to handle receiving an unsolicited message on social media?
Sounds like you support actual grooming.
You can join the military before you can drink. This country doesn’t make sense.
At least you can’t get drafted before you’re old enough to vote anymore.
It makes perfect sense when you remember that the worth of human life and ethics aren’t factored in when people decide how the country works.
Recruiters start working you long before you’re old enough to join.
Yup. I graduated high school at 17 and they were after me those last two years, at least. I was told I could have any job I wanted in the Navy due to my test scores. It was flattering and tempting.
We were all told we could have any job because our test scores were high. Come to find out that was a lie and while they might look at what you want to do, they’ll put you where they need you.
Why didn’t you pick like Fleet Admiral and then decommissioned all the ships before promptly quitting?
We usually call that grooming.
Recruiters groom children to kill.
I guess they probably do now because like 90% of high school grads have or did something that makes them ineligible to join and if they want more recruits they need to get students to not do things that make them ineligible and that might mean reaching out more than six months before they’re old enough to join.
They did when I was in school and that was like 25 years ago
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90% would be ineligible? how come?
The largest reasons are lack of physical fitness or criminal convictions
Also recruiters can’t or don’t want to recruit teens on ADHD or mood meds. If you can’t be an effective fighter without medicine they don’t want to find that out in the middle of a fight.
It’s not about “handling” anything. Not sure how you inferred that from my post.
Are you okay with army recruiters having your child’s cell phone number without their express consent?
When I was in high school our home phone number was published in the phone book and military recruiters called it a few times when I was getting close to finishing high school.
I’m not giving my kid a cell phone if I think them having it would endanger them. If unsolicited phone calls endanger them they shouldn’t have a cell phone. They should know what information shouldn’t be given out to strangers over the phone, on a call or via message. They should know how to block numbers and recognize calls that are best left to voicemail, &c.
I’m going to college right now and I’ve been getting messages from recruiters lately. They literally text me from their work numbers now.
Back in the early 2000’s I had a recruiter call my house asking for me, creepy AF.
When i was in high school 2003, my physics class devoted an entire period to a military recruiter… Sufficed to say, only the redneck kids were interested.
That’s mostly what they’re looking for anyways. They don’t want educated people who question the world around them, they want connon fodder.
Yeah they want dumbasses running their nuclear submarines and troubleshooting electronics.
Only like ten percent of the military is infantry.
Those guys that run the nuclear subs and electronics are 0.1% and the rest are grunt workers or data entry.
We had literally thousands of people going to school for electronics and various maintenance fields at any given time, it’s not even close to 0.1%. More like 20-30%.
Out of 1.4 million I’ll give ya the thousands in electronics but it ain’t 20%
Thousands in training at any one time, there’s tens of thousands actually in the fleet.
You think over 200000 people are high level tech people in the military? Lol
Those people they just entice with crazy checks and promises of leaving academia
Irrelevant, the original point was that they don’t want people who think, they want cannon fodder. As if people who can’t think would be capable of running a shop or leading technically minded people in workflows and processes that will affect missions weeks away. That’s just at the E-4/5 level, not even close to officers. If you can’t think in the military you’ll forever be bottom of the barrel, because planning and forethought is required for virtually all leadership roles beyond E-3.
90% of the military is in a field that has a direct civilian equivalent and is considered skilled work needing at least average intelligence and in most cases above. Most of the people shitting on the military in this thread couldn’t even hack half of the jobs the military needs people for.
They don’t want dumbasses there either. Turns out when your war is a silent game of hide and seek where the loser dies you have to be kind of smart.
I know that to be true, but if someone is claiming all enlisted personnel are window lickers the best way to prove them wrong immediately is to focus on the technical skill of the average servicemen.
Yeah infantry tactics aren’t for the stupid, not in modern wars at least. Advanced weapon systems and battlefield strategy require someone of reasonable intellect.
Back in 2001 the recruiter at my high school very nearly convinced my girlfriend at the time to join up. She was not cut out for that life, and did eventually back out.
Nice.
When I was in high school and I replied to the appearance of an army recruiter in my social studies class I objected to his presence there with the phrase, “surely you don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be here recruiting impressionable youth to bomb brown people in the name of fascism?” My teacher made me stand in the hallway and gave me a “0” on the days quiz. There was no fucking quiz.
You know, there’s an aspect to the bond, the camaraderie, the discipline, the fitness that I really appreciate about soldiering. Growing up with films like Band of Brothers practically on repeat, having read pretty close to every book that came out from those guys — well, I have admiration. But at the same time as I grew up and became more leftist I of course had many issues with the volatility of our leadership.
If I could’ve joined Norway, Canada, or German armed forces under the NATO banner, I may very well have done that. After seeing everything transpiring in Ukraine, I often wonder if I’d have the courage to do what those brave people are doing every day. In the right context, under purely defensive conditions, I’d like to think I would’ve thrived, but who knows…
But second to volatile leadership is quite honestly the type of people the military tends to attract. The desperate, the jar-head conservative types. If life is on the line, I’d rather not be in a foxhole with them if I’m honest.
But there’s a lot of talk that finally the culture may be shifting within the US Military — to attract smarter, better educated people. I know a lot of conservatives are retiring early and not joining up because they feel the “culture is changing,” which is a good sign to me.
