by The Z Man
The Hemingway line about bankruptcy happening gradually then suddenly is a great line because it applies to many things. The suddenly part is what everyone can see and what everyone remembers. It is the gradually part that is overlooked. It is the important part of the dynamic because it explains why the event occurred. Landslides are not random events but the accumulation of many small, unobserved events that eventually reach a tipping point and we get the big event.
That is something to keep in mind as the military struggles to both meet its recruitment numbers and maintain the human capital needed for its operations. Fifty years ago, after the Vietnam war, the military put an emphasis on quality over quantity in both its arms and the men using those arms. The lesson of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, the so-called Stripes period, was that the modern military needed to be smarter, relying on intelligence rather than just brute force.
There is a lot more to the renaissance of the American military that began fifty years ago, but the salient factor today is the emphasis on intelligence. The reason for that is the military is suffering from a brain-drain. The overall intelligence of the military is in decline and it is most acute among the officer class. According to that linked report from National Defense Press, “Two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980.”
As one would expect in this age of censorship, certain factors are left out of the discussion, but they hover over it like a fog. In fact, this reality hangs over everything in American society, despite the rules against acknowledging it. The highly complex machine that is the modern high tech American society is in a race. Will the robots reach the point where they can run things for us before the general intelligence of the population declines below a sustainable threshold?
Of course, a big driver is simply declining intelligence. All the research tells us that intelligence among European people has been in decline for a long time. The debate is how long it has been happening and why. The generally accepted estimate is that European people are losing one point per generation at the minimum. That study about the modern officer class suggests the decline is much more rapid, but that does not adjust for demographic factors.
Talk to anyone willing to be honest about the state of the American military and they will tell you that it would not fare well in a war against a peer. This is a lesson of the Ukraine war that is being ignored by the best people. Not only is this war more violent than anything the American military has experienced in fifty years, it is making demands on the officer class that the American military cannot meet. The American planned offensive last summer is a case in point. It was a disaster.
There is another factor to all of this, the thing that hangs over everything like a fog, and that is the thing no one is supposed to mention, which is demographics. That linked report mentions the collapse in the value of a college diploma, but it skips over why this has happened, which is the important bit. In response to demographic change and demographic reality, the modern levelers are forced to destroy the credentialing system so that it is no longer a measure of anything useful.
The military is finding out what every employer in American already knows and that is a college diploma is meaningless. In fact, it could be an indicator that the person will be a nuisance in the work place, making demands around social causes. The reason for this is the college system is more concerned with training young people for those causes than for preparing them to be productive citizens in the practical economy. College is no longer a reliable type of intelligence test.
Another aspect of the demographic crisis is the white out. This is the evolving process whereby white Americans exit the system by choice. The military, for example, is struggling to recruit white people, especially white men. The main reason for this is the social causes launched by the levelers inside the military to fix the reality of race within the military and make it a new model army for society. The immediate consequence of this is the military is getting dumber at a faster rate.
What is happening is white people are voting with their feet. Anyone who has seen a once popular restaurant or entertainment area go bust can understand what is happening across American society. It declines a little here and a little there without much notice, then all of a sudden everyone notices. In the case of a restaurant, this means the regulars stop being regular. In the case of an entertainment district, it often becomes a free fire zone for local youth.
