Can the US military recover its reputation?

It absolutely does and as I said it has become a huge problem. But it's not a massive game changing problem...yet. The writing is on the wall and in a few years when much of the old guard is gone I genuinely am concerned about the overall capability of the military. As it stands now the old troops openly disregard and mock the crap like mandatory sensitivity training for the unnecessary poison garbage that it is. Hell in my neck of the woods we don't even participate we just use that 1 day a month to catch up on paperwork and then leave and go to the bar at around lunch time. The problem is going to arise when we are gone and those behind us were raised in the ranks believing in that crap.

I was just having this discussion with a Senior NCO the other day. As of right now entities like IG are still on the side of sanity. The guy who processes the IG complaints that the young Soldiers send is a retired CSM (in my neck of the woods anyway). So he reads the complaint then gives somebody a call asking for explanation. 99% of the time it goes the same way it went when he called me for information about a recent complaint. "Haha thanks for the explanation Sir, I just read through the regulation you sent over, this complaint sounds like nothing more than the kids bitching again, sorry to bother you we aren't even investigating this". Then he reports it up to his boss and it's over. That's because he is an old retired CSM. The problem is going to arise when folks like him are gone and replaced by people brainwashed by progressive political correctness. It'll no longer be a quick phone call asking "hey is this legit or just the kids whining"? It'll be "we must investigate this because this is a toxic work environment and they are mentally abusing Soldiers by yelling at them" or something.

The things that we older troops would have been MORTIFIED to do growing up in the Army these new Soldiers do on an hourly basis nowadays. And pretty soon these knuckleheads will grow up to be NCO knuckleheads in charge of newer knuckleheads and the whole system is going to go straight to ****. And I for one am glad I won't be around when that happens because the writing is CLEARLY already on the wall and anybody who claims otherwise is not actually in the military or is part of the problem by believing that this "change" is good for us.

 

Well when the progressive entities that control the narrative backed by a huge chunk of the population believe that the entire fabric of our society needs an overhaul at literally ANY COST then nothing will change. That ideology doesn't care and it cannot be reasoned with. Take a look at society in places like the once great San Francisco. It doesn't matter how bad it gets, how expensive, how much crime or homelessness or poverty, etc they will continue to double down on their policies. Why? Because not being "mean" and "caring" and "understanding" and "mental health" are all literally more important to that ideology than the actual literal collapse of a society. This is the ideology that literally promotes obesity because encouraging an obese unhealthy person to lose weight is detrimental to their mental health and "mean". Their "mental health" is more important than their actual health.

Now take that brief understanding of how that ideology operates and apply it to the military and it's no longer hard to understand. They don't care about the detriment of the military, they don't care about the reduced effectiveness and lethality. They don't care about lowered standards and indiscipline. None of that matters as long as everyone feels accepted and included and we reduce the amount of funny racist quotes written in the porta pottys. You don't know what will bring the military back to seriousness because we are being infected by an ideology that doesn't CARE about that. As you said, we just lost a war and retreated in a humiliatingly pathetic manner and any rational person would believe this is the time for restructuring and rebuilding based on lessons learned to ensure we don't have this problem again. ALL FOCUS should be on increasing fighting effectiveness and lethality. But instead we force the entire DoD to take an entire day every month to stop ALL operations and get lectures on accepting the new transgenders that are showing up and report your buddy who may have a rebel flag on his facebook page back when he was 15. Why? Because these people DON'T CARE, those are their PRIORITIES. Years ago we ran commercials showing grunts in training, tanks firing, explosions, gunfire, blood, sweat, tears, etc. "Be all you can be", "Army of One", "There's strong and then theres Army Strong!", "Warriors Wanted" sign up if you have what it takes.

Nowadays..."When I was a little girl I grew up with two mommies and people made fun of me but look at me now I'm climbing over this wall in basic training! I'm a Soldier! yay!!"

We're ****ed.

 

Sadly it's true. Today I had a lengthy discussion with some pretty high ranking personnel who came to visit during our exercise. After the "formalities" we began sitting around shooting the **** in my office. We had the EXACT conversation that we've been having in this thread and I made plenty of the same statements to them as I've made to you all here.

One of them said in rough quote "At the end of the day society no longer cares about the effectiveness or readiness of the military as long as we have X amount of women or black people with Stars on their chests. Warfighting ability be damned".

Yup. And of course the sensitive ones in society will cringe at that comment but that gentleman is 100% correct but what he said isn't "politically correct" so he has to keep such sentiments among his peers and spew "correct" talking point BS when speaking in the public forum.

The silver lining is the fact that the vast majority of the military knows this is all utter crap and detrimental to the force as a whole. They simply know how to play the game and know what to say and when and know when to shut up. You don't get to the ranks of these types of people by being too proud and/or stupid to know when to shut up. It's all political, and the majority of those outside of the very top of the top of brass don't actually believe in any of this crap and to be honest I'm seriously not even sure if the top brass believes in the BS they support in Washington.

The bottom line comes down to Congressional and Electoral leadership having the fortitude to tell the "progressive" ideology to shut the hell up regardless of societal pressure. One of the best things about Gen Mattis being the SecDef was the fact that he walked in and purged most of this crap overnight at the stroke of pen. He sent out emails and mandates that pretty much said "anything not directly contributing to increasing your readiness and lethality as a fighting force is cancelled effective immediately". Basically get rid of mandatory monthly training like SHARP, EO, diversity, sensitivity, inclusivity, etc. All that free time we just created will be replaced with basic warfighting functions and leaders time training. IE if you have time to sit around and learn about BS like that then you have time to go to the range and/or teach battle drills or basic Soldiering skills. All of that quickly changed once the new progressive inspired Administration took power and decided that such things in the MILITARY should take a backseat to more important concerns such as making everyone feel welcome and not hurting anyones feelings.

What we need is Mattis without his willingness to stay in Afghanistan for the rest of humanity because the guy was born and bred to fight for his entire life and doesn't understand anything else.

I have the raw data numbers and the data that the news articles and media doesn't post because they can't. The old timers are sick of this crap and are only holding on until retirement because they've come way too far to quit now. The mid range folks have left in DROVES. And incentives and whatnot are driving up the newcomers numbers. To put it in layman's terms there are only a handful of years left before the "old guard" war vets from the Iraq invasion and beyond are gone, the mid grade guard of the same wars are already mostly gone, and the new post war generation raised in this asinine society of ours takes over.

We are the wall that this new generation of progressives are battering against. When we are gone, which will be soon....well...

Good luck.