Bacle, I am active duty.
I work woth people who have been serving before a lot of us were born.
Hell, I have spoken to plenty of vets who say they would rather have that then Army Strong.
Because the whole thing about Be All you Can be, is it is the truth.
Unlike what you believe about the military, there is more to it then you will ever know.
You see the problem with going to what the older folks, who are already in the service, believe will work for recruiting? It really should be fairly obvious to someone not coming at this from the inside.
It is young blood and bodies that are needed, so trying to appeal to the sensibilities of older folks is often counterproductive. Not that I expect many military members to be willing to say 'Sit down Col. Boomer, you don't know how to run Zoomer PR.', because admitting that the old ways don't always work is something the military hates doing unless forced to.
Wanna know ow something else?
The VA has nothing to do with the military.
It is run outside the DoD.
Because that's just hoe it is.
This completely ignores the role that VA benefits have played in recruiting campaigns for decades, and is trying to skate on a technicality.
Just because the VA is not directly under the DoD, IN NO WAY changes it's association with the military and military life, because it's not random civies who get to go to VA clinics (thank god, given the quality of the VA for years).
But hey, you want to insist VA shit should have no bearing on the recruiting issues, when it very much does, no wonder the Army's PR dept sucks if this is the interior feed back they get from motards.
Amd wokeness is a problem because if people like you.
"NO ONE WANTS TO JOIN BECAUSE IF WOKENESS!" Is caused by "REPEMT FOR YOUR VIETNAM SINS!" and all the other bullshit you have spewed about the military.
The military doesn't cater to your group.
There is a reason the military does not use Vietnam imagery when trying to recruit, a reason that has everything to do with that being an unjust war the US military cannot admit it should not have fought and the the fact that it is a lingering black eye on the US military it tries to stick make-up over anytime it's mentioned.
We should not have been in Vietnam to begin with, and were only there because France threaten to join the commies if we didn't try to help them keep their colony.
The military increasingly cannot afford to be as picky as it once was, because people saw through the PR illusions and internal propaganda the US military put out, riding on the WW2 glory and thinking it would last forever.
Also, you'd be surprised that other Army folks are still trying to recruit me for NG or PA shit on Discord, because they actually realize how bad the ads has been and how stupid the militarizes PR campaigns have generally been for the past few decades. Plus, those nice bonuses/promotions for referring a recruit do exist, and the military is hard up for bodies pretty much everywhere except the Air Force.
Though realistically, if I wanted to serve, I'd go to the Coasties; much, much better QoL, more stable home-life, and I like boats more than tanks.
Also, there are more people like me in this nation now, and those even more skeptical of military life as it currently is, than there are like you, and that ratio is likely to get even worse going forward. Deal with the populace you have, not the populace you wish you had.
Which do you think will get more potential recruits; only preaching to the choir of those already in uniform, and thus representing a shrinking subset of the non-woke population? Or realizing that if the military can unfuck itself enough to make people like me cheer others joining again, instead cringing at their potential misfortune, maybe they can get the recruiting numbers back up again.
Basically, the Marines are able to use the same stuff and reuse old stuff but the second the Army does its stupid.
Like every person that believes the shit you do about the military
Marine's never took draftees, they are all volunteer, always have been, and the Marine's are the ones who guard POTUS/guard the Navy's nukes.
Army PR will never come close to matching that, shouldn't even try. It'd be better off advertising about being an Patriot/ABM operator or part of the Corp of Engineers.
I mean fuck, the Army could do worse than just going to Bethasda and asking the Fallout people to handle their PR from now on, it's probably work better on the younger gens than old Boomerisms like the latest ad campaign.