That scraping noise you hear…
 

…is the bottom of the barrel.

https://i.ibb.co/Xpkt0Gq/IMG-6647.jpg


https://www.airandspaceforces.com/ai...uit-age-limit/

And it’s joint service…
 

https://i.ibb.co/YbJGP6J/66-D1-A5-EF...5-BC0-B0-B.jpg

the outlook is SNAFU trending toward FUBAR.

WITH BOTH RECRUITING AND RETENTION PROBLEMS ALREADY, a screwup like this will further deplete those who MIGHT have gone career.

With the rush to leave only the “best and brightest“ are left to fix things.

Perhaps true, but quantity still has a quality all of its own. And the ‘force multiplier” concept becomes a force divider situation when you actually do start taking casualties simply because you were counting on those fewer highly capable resources to do so much.

Perhaps a worthwhile read:

https://thehill.com/opinion/national...any-major-war/
Some excerpts:

IRR is of very limited utility anyway, unless the Wehrmacht is massing in your suburbs, which isn't a realistic issue for the US (unlike say Israel).

Those folks are not current on anything, and not held to any fitness standards. Politically, it's been shown that they are actually hard to mobilize on an involuntary basis when you actually need them. Our IRR system is impractical, with a vast array of MOS's who are completely out of touch with their community and skillset. A more practical IRR would be people focused on specific basic grunt skills, and required to show up and practice that for a couple days each year. And take a fitness test.

Our military prevails by being very good at graduate-level processes, and technology. IRR can't keep up with that.


In reality if a big bubble went up, we'd recall retirees who have decades of experience, some of it recent, and are leadership material. Use them as the core cadre to build up a volunteer/draft force.

Military pay is actually pretty good now, at least for enlisted with no real marketable job skill coming out of high school.

Let's take a look at an E4 who enlisted in 2020. Their base pay, housing allowance, and food allowance add up to $57,396/yr (no dependents). And the housing I calculated using CLT, which is a fairly moderate cost of living area.
The CLT housing allowance is $1566 without dependents, $2013 with dependents. So a married E4 would draw around $63,000/yr.

To make $60K/yr in the civilian world working a 40 hour week you'd need to make $29/hour.

A big problem the recruiters have is only 23% of young people are even qualified to enlist, at least that's what I've read.

True, but a McDonalds starting worker is currently making $14 an hour in my state. That’s for a high school sophomore working part time after school with no prior job experience.

And even $60k after inflation is not what it once was.

People don't enlist for the money in most cases. More likely it's to get job training, college bennies, get out of Mayberry, do something different, or just plain serve. Usually a combination of things.

The benefits make up for for some pay.

Compensation becomes more of a factor for retention of experienced personnel, especially if their skill is marketable.

Perhaps so, but it isn’t just the IRR that has shortfalls. It’s the Active and Reserve of all the services except the Marine Corp. even the Coasties…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigho...h=26a759c8648c

.

Some of it recent, some not. Some will still be medically qualified, some won’t. But putting people through basic is going to take at least ten weeks AFTER you get a draft law passed, deal with court challenges if females are not included in the draft (if we can even define who is a female or male and who identifies as something else) and all the admin and logistics actually get done to get them to the training centers which don’t currently have a lot of excess capacity either and - yeah, often aren’t in tremendous shape

https://www.military.com/daily-news/...s-lack-of.html

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105797.pdf

(nor, for that matter, are your would be draftees).

https://americanmilitarynews.com/202...n-study-finds/

But let’s assume we overcome those hurdles and get those people through basic training and in some modest form of physical and mental fitness.
That gets you a bare E-1 who can probably wear a uniform with only minor faux pas’s. Technical schools to actually use the highly advanced equipment an take anywhere from three weeks to 2 years. Of course, that would require the defense industrial base to spin up as well, something the Ukraine War is showing us is much easier said than done.

That would only be required in the event of a fundamental shift in geo-politics, which would take time.

Any realistic major conflict we'd be looking at would be a fight tonight, with what you have scenario. It will be over relatively quickly. It's *vastly* more important to have the force structure on hand to deter or prevail in such a conflict, than to worry about deep reserves or conscription. Force structure can include drilling reserves, especially if they're smart about what part-timers can stay current on, and what they cannot.

If things go horribly wrong and we somehow end up in WW-III, and it somehow drags out without going to nuclear, then we'll will have time for reserves, draft, Rosie the Riveter, etc, etc