Canada doesn’t matter to the rest of the world - and it’s our own fault

[Good2Golf]

Sorry to resurrect a dead horse, but I just came across this article that is a rebuttal to all the negative articles about the 'woke' issue in the CMJ that was much discussed many pages back.



Link

“Rebuttal”



Ironic that he states much of the CAF’s issues…and yet how long has he been at the Canadian Forces College helping educate CAF future leaders??? (how’s that return on investment?)

 

[Brad Sallows]

Diversity isn't going to fix attraction if the targets were never going to seriously consider military service in the first place. But done poorly, it can reduce attraction among those who would.

Ask Budweiser.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Diversity isn't going to fix attraction if the targets were never going to seriously consider military service in the first place. But done poorly, it can reduce attraction among those who would.

Ask Budweiser.

The Uber-Right in the USA have seized on this one - spouting what are likely the wrong reasons for the decline - but FWIW...

Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits​

The Army's recruiting of white soldiers has dropped significantly in the last half decade, according to internal data reviewed by Military.com, a decline that accounts for much of the service's historic recruitment slump that has become the subject of increasing concern for Army leadership and Capitol Hill.

The shift in demographics for incoming recruits would be irrelevant to war planners, except it coincides with an overall shortfall of about 10,000 recruits for the Army in 2023 as the service missed its target of 65,000 new soldiers. That deficit is straining the force as it has ramped up its presence in the Pacific and Europe: A smaller Army is taking on a larger mission and training workload than during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- leading to soldiers being away from home now more than ever.

A total of 44,042 new Army recruits were categorized by the service as white in 2018, but that number has fallen consistently each year to a low of 25,070 in 2023, with a 6% dip from 2022 to 2023 being the most significant drop. No other demographic group has seen such a precipitous decline, though there have been ups and downs from year to year.

In 2018, 56.4% of new recruits were categorized as white. In 2023, that number had fallen to 44%. During that same five-year period, Black recruits have gone from 20% to 24% of the pool, and Hispanic recruits have risen from 17% to 24%, with both groups seeing largely flat recruiting totals but increasing as a percentage of incoming soldiers as white recruiting has fallen.

Army Sees Sharp Decline in White Recruits

The shift in demographics for incoming recruits would be irrelevant to war planners, except it coincides with an overall shortfall of about 10,000 recruits for the Army in 2023.

www.military.com

 

[Good2Golf]

But this is what is desired. Proportionately, there will be more non-white recruits which will help to increase the proportion of desired demographics.

 

[GK .Dundas]

Please ignore I jumped the gun when posting.

 

[Quirky]

Skin colour and gender won’t make a god damn difference if all the core issues of retention aren’t addressed.

They aren’t.

 

[FJAG]

But this is what is desired. Proportionately, there will be more non-white recruits which will help to increase the proportion of desired demographics.

Except the proportion of the US by race and ethnicity is:

White - 59.3%

Hispanic - 18.9%

Black - 12.6%

Asian - 5.9%

Someone should let the Republican know that if they let illegal immigrants enlist, the recruiting crisis would be over.

 

[Brad Sallows]

The Uber-Right in the USA have seized on this one - spouting what are likely the wrong reasons for the decline - but FWIW...

I can guess that they have the same problem we do - people have other options, and freedom of choice.

 

[Rifleman62]

CAF worsening recruitment woes​

OPEN HOSTILITY TO WHITE MALES NOT HELPFUL - National Post - 10 Feb 2024 - JAMIE SARKONAK​

Personnel numbers for the Canadian Armed Forces are at crisis levels, writes Jamie Sarkonak.

Like every army ever, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have always been predominantly male. And, as a country with a majority of the population being of European descent, its members have been predominantly white. These facts should be uncontroversial.

But unlike every army ever, the CAF is using the identities of its historic membership to promote an ethos of guilt and shame within the institution. This isn’t fixing the present recruitment crisis and it’s doubtful that it ever will — but this approach has the firm support of scholarly military voices, the latest example coming to us from Paul Mitchell, a defence studies professor at the Canadian Forces College.

“The idea that our armed forces are ‘too woke’ misunderstands efforts to improve the work environment for historically under-represented groups,” Mitchell wrote this week for the Conversation. He argued that recruitment is falling among white males, and because the visible minority population is increasing, the military needs to turn its eyes elsewhere.

He was, in part, coming to the defence of the Canadian Military Journal which was criticized for its ideological slant last month. The journal’s summer issue was chockfull of identity-politic diatribes. In one article on the military’s festering “whiteness” problem, an author confirmed systemic racism was indeed happening based on a few qualitative interviews with non-white service members analyzed through the lens of racial, anti-western philosophy.

“I want to stress that the institutionalization of whiteness requires ongoing work by individuals who uphold white settler norms,” she wrote, widely assigning blame.
Another article suggested that military cultural norms should be shifted with ideological education. “Structural forms of power and privilege,” it argued, should guide lessons on colonialism, racism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and heteronormativity; discomfort — that is, demoralization — should be embraced in learning.

The periodicals drenched in leftist theory, and our dear professor’s defence of it, aren’t just silly culture war musings that have no effect. Their effect can be found on the surface, in human resources materials and “anti-racism toolkits” that teach leftist racial ideology as fact. Deeper changes go to the heart of the CAF bureaucracy, which has bloated to include “diversity and inclusion champions,” affirmative action officers among its roles, and evaluations that examine a member’s “inclusive behaviours” as of 2022. Baked-in to all this is an understanding that masculinity, the “warrior ideal” and colonial history are fundamentally toxic to military culture.

But if there’s any institution that should be comfortable as a male-dominated space, it’s our military. It’s an institution whose job is to fight and defend, and, like any professional standing army in history, tends to draw from groups most capable of doing that: men. Men are more fight-prone for all sorts of reasons, and it’s an army’s job to channel and discipline these tendencies for the benefit of society as a whole. That doesn’t mean that women in the service should be left to fend for themselves — the opposite: they deserve to be treated with dignity like anyone else, and should expect any perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault to be fully prosecuted — but the institution doesn’t need to be de-masculinized to do that.

Similarly, the CAF should be able to take pride in its heritage as a descendant of the British system, while making sure to discipline anyone who harasses or attacks enlisted Indigenous people and minorities. It can do outreach to make itself known as an option to these groups, but leave the navel-gazing about unquantifiable systems of power and oppression to civil sociologists.

The sudden urgency to have the Canadian military reflect the nation’s demographics with perfect precision is odd, because this hasn’t been the case in about a century. A 2007 study observed that the primary recruiting pool consists of men who are: fit, aged 17 to 20, high-school educated, rural or small-city in origin and Caucasian in background. They also tend to come from families with a history of service. One can glean that the military was a good choice for those who wanted a stable career without having to dedicate his 20s to expensive education that doesn’t offer a clear path to a decent income.

“It is likely that the only time the Canadian Forces ever truly ‘reflected’ Canada was when conscription was in force during the two great global conflicts of the 20th century,” mused the study.

The author of the 2007 study concluded that demographic cherry-picking was probably a futile exercise. Unrealistically high identity targets proportionate to the population were unlikely to ever be met for a variety of reasons, including immigrant families’ tendency to encourage kids to go into professional fields of work with prospects for high income. It appears that while white, working-class rurals saw service as a class-booster, immigrants, especially more recent ones, often don’t. The inevitable falling-short of artificially high diversity targets, the author predicted, would “only entrench further the perception of organizational inertia and systemic racism” in the CAF and deter minority participation.

Academics like Mitchell, and his colleague Stephen Saideman, have insisted that a diversity-equity-and-inclusion culture change is key to raising recruitment and bolstering retention, but it’s hard to see how. Despite outreach efforts to newer recruiting pools and the hosting of cultural events that may appeal to them, personnel numbers are still at crisis levels, with the CAF being short 16,000 people. Recruitment hasn’t much improved in the past few years, either, with new members numbering at 10,300 in 2019-20, 4,300 in 2020-21, 8,100 in 2021-22 and 7,200 in 2022-23. Retention is poor, and people are leaving in greater numbers than they are joining.

“If all you think of the military is that it is for straight white dudes, then that’s not going to attract the 60 to 70 per cent of Canadians who are not straight white dudes,” Saideman told CTV last year.

It’s nothing new to reach out to recently-joined demographics to augment one’s forces: the Romans did it, the Brits did it, the French did it; it’s common sense. But importantly, this shouldn’t involve outright rejection of the recruiting base. Canada has foolishly done this: aside from embracing rhetorical attacks on “whiteness” and masculinity, it’s actually de-prioritized the enlisting of white men since at least 2018. In the U.K., a similar philosophy of alienation has been adopted only to see recruitment fall, with one British military leader telling staff to stop choosing “useless white male pilots” in 2021. (China doesn’t seem to have this complaint, having happily hired ex-british air force pilots to train their communist counterparts.)

Combine the CAF’S new cultural hostility to its recruitment base with just how much penny-pinching the military does, from meal reimbursements to monthly costof-living adjustments, it’s no wonder that fewer people want to join. Last year, housing benefits were clawed back from 7,700 members to be redistributed to new recruits. Members are leaving simply because they can’t afford the basics on a CAF salary.

Want a military that’s attractive to both the increasingly-turned-off traditional recruiting pool and immigrants? Offer prosperity — not the racial propaganda of the left.

MEN ARE MORE FIGHT-PRONE FOR ALL SORTS OF REASONS.

 

[dimsum]

CAF worsening recruitment woes​

OPEN HOSTILITY TO WHITE MALES NOT HELPFUL - National Post - 10 Feb 2024 - JAMIE SARKONAK​

Personnel numbers for the Canadian Armed Forces are at crisis levels, writes Jamie Sarkonak.

Like every army ever, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have always been predominantly male. And, as a country with a majority of the population being of European descent, its members have been predominantly white. These facts should be uncontroversial.

But unlike every army ever, the CAF is using the identities of its historic membership to promote an ethos of guilt and shame within the institution. This isn’t fixing the present recruitment crisis and it’s doubtful that it ever will — but this approach has the firm support of scholarly military voices, the latest example coming to us from Paul Mitchell, a defence studies professor at the Canadian Forces College.

“The idea that our armed forces are ‘too woke’ misunderstands efforts to improve the work environment for historically under-represented groups,” Mitchell wrote this week for the Conversation. He argued that recruitment is falling among white males, and because the visible minority population is increasing, the military needs to turn its eyes elsewhere.

He was, in part, coming to the defence of the Canadian Military Journal which was criticized for its ideological slant last month. The journal’s summer issue was chockfull of identity-politic diatribes. In one article on the military’s festering “whiteness” problem, an author confirmed systemic racism was indeed happening based on a few qualitative interviews with non-white service members analyzed through the lens of racial, anti-western philosophy.

“I want to stress that the institutionalization of whiteness requires ongoing work by individuals who uphold white settler norms,” she wrote, widely assigning blame.
Another article suggested that military cultural norms should be shifted with ideological education. “Structural forms of power and privilege,” it argued, should guide lessons on colonialism, racism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, and heteronormativity; discomfort — that is, demoralization — should be embraced in learning.

The periodicals drenched in leftist theory, and our dear professor’s defence of it, aren’t just silly culture war musings that have no effect. Their effect can be found on the surface, in human resources materials and “anti-racism toolkits” that teach leftist racial ideology as fact. Deeper changes go to the heart of the CAF bureaucracy, which has bloated to include “diversity and inclusion champions,” affirmative action officers among its roles, and evaluations that examine a member’s “inclusive behaviours” as of 2022. Baked-in to all this is an understanding that masculinity, the “warrior ideal” and colonial history are fundamentally toxic to military culture.

But if there’s any institution that should be comfortable as a male-dominated space, it’s our military. It’s an institution whose job is to fight and defend, and, like any professional standing army in history, tends to draw from groups most capable of doing that: men. Men are more fight-prone for all sorts of reasons, and it’s an army’s job to channel and discipline these tendencies for the benefit of society as a whole. That doesn’t mean that women in the service should be left to fend for themselves — the opposite: they deserve to be treated with dignity like anyone else, and should expect any perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault to be fully prosecuted — but the institution doesn’t need to be de-masculinized to do that.

Similarly, the CAF should be able to take pride in its heritage as a descendant of the British system, while making sure to discipline anyone who harasses or attacks enlisted Indigenous people and minorities. It can do outreach to make itself known as an option to these groups, but leave the navel-gazing about unquantifiable systems of power and oppression to civil sociologists.

The sudden urgency to have the Canadian military reflect the nation’s demographics with perfect precision is odd, because this hasn’t been the case in about a century. A 2007 study observed that the primary recruiting pool consists of men who are: fit, aged 17 to 20, high-school educated, rural or small-city in origin and Caucasian in background. They also tend to come from families with a history of service. One can glean that the military was a good choice for those who wanted a stable career without having to dedicate his 20s to expensive education that doesn’t offer a clear path to a decent income.

“It is likely that the only time the Canadian Forces ever truly ‘reflected’ Canada was when conscription was in force during the two great global conflicts of the 20th century,” mused the study.

The author of the 2007 study concluded that demographic cherry-picking was probably a futile exercise. Unrealistically high identity targets proportionate to the population were unlikely to ever be met for a variety of reasons, including immigrant families’ tendency to encourage kids to go into professional fields of work with prospects for high income. It appears that while white, working-class rurals saw service as a class-booster, immigrants, especially more recent ones, often don’t. The inevitable falling-short of artificially high diversity targets, the author predicted, would “only entrench further the perception of organizational inertia and systemic racism” in the CAF and deter minority participation.

Academics like Mitchell, and his colleague Stephen Saideman, have insisted that a diversity-equity-and-inclusion culture change is key to raising recruitment and bolstering retention, but it’s hard to see how. Despite outreach efforts to newer recruiting pools and the hosting of cultural events that may appeal to them, personnel numbers are still at crisis levels, with the CAF being short 16,000 people. Recruitment hasn’t much improved in the past few years, either, with new members numbering at 10,300 in 2019-20, 4,300 in 2020-21, 8,100 in 2021-22 and 7,200 in 2022-23. Retention is poor, and people are leaving in greater numbers than they are joining.

“If all you think of the military is that it is for straight white dudes, then that’s not going to attract the 60 to 70 per cent of Canadians who are not straight white dudes,” Saideman told CTV last year.

It’s nothing new to reach out to recently-joined demographics to augment one’s forces: the Romans did it, the Brits did it, the French did it; it’s common sense. But importantly, this shouldn’t involve outright rejection of the recruiting base. Canada has foolishly done this: aside from embracing rhetorical attacks on “whiteness” and masculinity, it’s actually de-prioritized the enlisting of white men since at least 2018. In the U.K., a similar philosophy of alienation has been adopted only to see recruitment fall, with one British military leader telling staff to stop choosing “useless white male pilots” in 2021. (China doesn’t seem to have this complaint, having happily hired ex-british air force pilots to train their communist counterparts.)

Combine the CAF’S new cultural hostility to its recruitment base with just how much penny-pinching the military does, from meal reimbursements to monthly costof-living adjustments, it’s no wonder that fewer people want to join. Last year, housing benefits were clawed back from 7,700 members to be redistributed to new recruits. Members are leaving simply because they can’t afford the basics on a CAF salary.

Want a military that’s attractive to both the increasingly-turned-off traditional recruiting pool and immigrants? Offer prosperity — not the racial propaganda of the left.

MEN ARE MORE FIGHT-PRONE FOR ALL SORTS OF REASONS.

So, at the risk of re-stirring pots (and a disclaimer that I am neither rural nor Caucasian), since the Canadian demographic is getting more urban (and immigrant), should the CAF prioritize trying to recruit from the shrinking rural Caucasian 18-21 year old male sector, or focus on the growing urban immigrant / newer citizen sector?

It’s one thing if the base is steady or expanding, but the traditional CAF recruiting base is shrinking. Also, the CAF does not have a shortage of applicants, it has a shortage of folks willing to put up with the long application process.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Before worrying about the size of the recruiting base, the first question is how large a recruiting base is needed to maintain a force as small as Canada's. Chasing people disinclined to show up in the first place is a waste of resources if they aren't actually needed.

 

[Kirkhill]

Two other perspectives on recruiting

US - blame it on Covid, DEI, the economy etc.

Why Military Recruitment Is Miserable | National Review

Recruiters help clarify what exactly is causing their sign-up woes — and it’s not just the aftermath of the pandemic.

www.nationalreview.com

UK - send out the recruiting sergeant

Putting uniformed soldiers back into frontline recruiting credited with boosting applications

WO1 Paul Carney says the recent warning from the Chief of the General Staff is also helping recruit more soldiers into the ranks.

www.forces.net

 

[Quirky]

should the CAF prioritize trying to recruit from the shrinking rural Caucasian 18-21 year old male sector, or focus on the growing urban immigrant / newer citizen sector?

The CAF should prioritize retention because recruiting has been a dismal failure.

 

[dapaterson]

The CAF should prioritize retention because recruiting has been a dismal failure.

The CAF's retention rate is better than most allies and, arguably, is too high, not providing for sufficient opportunities for turnover and progression.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

The CAF should prioritize retention because recruiting has been a dismal failure.

Retention is actually pretty good, by the standards of our allies. Maybe even too good, in that we are retaining too many of the wrong people, for too long.

Edit: dapaterson, as usual, beat me to it.

 

[OldSolduer]

So why I joined in 1974. I was 17. The Army looked cool. Rifles, SMGs, cool uniforms. Just fuck*ng cool. Challenging and fun - except Dundurn in January and that was not fun. Embrace the suck dudes.
So make the (insert service here) look cool again.

 

[Quirky]

The CAF's retention rate is better than most allies

Is that the metric we are going by, our retention is shit, but at least it isn't as bad as country X?

This whole recruiting thing is hilarious, the CAF has alienated it's core demographic base - the white Caucasian male, (rural or uban doesn't matter), and visible minorities and women aren't exactly flooding to the recruiting centers. When they do get there, they are faced with a massively long wait, which hasn't improved in years, where they ultimately find nothing much of value.

 

[dapaterson]

What do you mean, "retention is shit"? Is ~8% terrible?

And I take it you work in the recruiting system and have access to the applicant file demographics? Or are you pulling that out of your ass?

 

[Aper]

So why I joined in 1974. I was 17. The Army looked cool. Rifles, SMGs, cool uniforms. Just fuck*ng cool. Challenging and fun - except Dundurn in January and that was not fun. Embrace the suck dudes.
So make the (insert service here) look cool again.

With the WOKE mentality of the last years, this might never happen again. When I look at the younger generations, society has yet to drastically change before putting back the Alpha male soldier kicking ass and chewing bubble gum icon we used to have back in the 90's.

Kids/Teens these days don't care about joining the military; it was never a profession of choice especially with less and less promotion.

 

[dapaterson]

Kids/Teens these days...