Ian Welsh

So, the American military can’t make its enlistment quotas:

According to widely-reported leaks the US Army missed its recruiting target by an enormous amount in FY23 and will shrink by some 24,000 people going into 2024 – over 5% of its end strength. Apparently most of the positions being cut are already empty.

It’s no mystery why this is happening – most of the recruiting crisis is attributable to a catastrophic drop in accessions among white men. This is a huge demographic which disproportionately seeks to join the combat arms, so the impact to the Army’s combat power is disproportionately large even in comparison to those bleak numbers.

The usual explanation given for this is the one given at the link: it’s primarily about woke politics.

I’ve spent some time hanging around where US veterans talk, and there’s something to it. The people who aren’t enlisting seem to be disproportionately the children of previous veterans: those veterans used to encourage their children to enlist, now they are telling them not to. These are often families where members have served for generations.

But it’s not all culture war, and I’m not sure it’s even primarily culture war: complaints about under-pay, terrible base housing (including black mold) and forever-war abound. The only really good thing the army has going it for it now is that it still pays for college— or that’s the consensus. And enlistment issues were developing under Trump, even before Biden, it’s not primarily a partisan issue.

None of these problems can be easily fixed. The US military budget is already huge, but raising pay would require paying less for equipment and to contractors, and that’s how politicians, important donors and ex-generals get rich. Fixing bases might be slightly easier, since it can be done by contractors, but it’s not as high return to the political donor class as vastly over-priced equipment and shitty weapons. As for Forever War, well, the neoliberal and neoconservative factions are united in support.

There are two obvious solutions. The first is a draft and there has been floating of the idea. I think it will happen. Among the veterans and military hangers-on there’s a lot of doubt about it for a variety of reasons. It would require the army to organize to work with a draft, among other things, but one criticism is that it would be hard to enforce the draft because America is full of dangerous men with lots of guns and seizing people off the street the way the Ukrainians do wouldn’t go well.

I tend to agree, but that’s not how it will be done. Instead, if you don’t report, they’ll freeze all your accounts and forbid all financial institutions, including credit card companies, paypal and crypto exchanges from doing any business with you, including transferring money or even cashing endorsed checks (though checks are barely a thing any more.)

If your family aids and abets you, well, the same thing can be done to them.

This was pioneered en-masse during the Canadian truckers protest. I didn’t like the protest, but the way it was shut down was absolute totalitarian garbage. It worked, though. People can’t survive without money in this economy, and the cash economy is miniscule. Back in the late 80s I lived in it for a while, and it was easily do-able with very minor sacrifices, at least at the lower-class level. Tons of businesses would accept endorsed checks and checks were the main way wages were paid, for example. Landlords would take cash and didn’t sneer at it, nor did they check your credit rating. Full time jobs even existed which would pay in cash, and tons of part time jobs and casual labor paid cash, plus every business accepted it.

Now, not so much. No need to go into details, we all live in our near-post-cash shitty economy.

The reduction of the cash economy is the hall mark off all semi-totalitarian systems: systems which want to enforce how you spend your money and how you get paid. Much as I like them in other ways, this includes Scandinavian systems and much of Europe. Almost the first thing Modi in India did was remove all large bills from circulation, this was part of his authoritarian bent, and was economically disastrous.

Paper cash is freedom. Centralized electronic exchange is tyranny. As with all tyranny, it’s great for strop crime, but “crime” is defined by politicians and judges owned by oligarchs. Not sending your child to die for your country? Crime.

Now the second way around this is still not quite possible, but it will be very soon: autonomous killer robots. I remember reading that in the invasion of Armenia some people were killed by them, but they’ll soon be mainline because they are resistant to jamming and they don’t require operators.

Internally this is great: you don’t have the “will they fire?” issue that troops and even cops sometimes have when faced with dissent. All you need is techies to maintain and program them and someone to give the orders, none of whom have to be right there doing the killed and hearing the screams of the people they’re killing, right up and personal. Plus there’ll be lots of profit opportunities for the oligarch class, retired generals and politicians and their families.

Externally it’s great too. Who cares if your population won’t sign up for forever war killing gooks who never did anything to you?

Welcome to the future of war. Join the military or starve, and, increasingly, be killed by a robot.

(This will be a brief era, though it will seem long to live thru. Civilization collapse will deal with it, though not as fast as we’d like. Now that they’re perfected, drones/robots are not that hard to build. Rescue from them will probably require collapse of the semiconductor or battery industry.)

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