I keep seeing these videos:
Hint: they're "unqualified" because nerds make gear that only other nerds can use. The end result of this is that only nerds can join the army. Nerds cannot raise everyone to their level (because they're inherently too anti-social/autistic to do that), they can only exclude everyone that doesn't meet their high standards. On top of that elitism, when you attract nerds to the army, they expect the army to rival a Google Campus or their morale goes down.
The problem is not the "rocks" at the bottom, it's the nerds at the top literally coding exclusion into the shit they make. The Ukrainians told the Americans to stop send them all of that hi-tech gear, and to send them the easier-to-use old school stuff, because they just don't have the experience to use the new gear effectively, and they don't have the time to spend learning how to use it. That's your hint that you need stop allowing nerds to "fail upwards" in the army.
I didn't know the Army had make-up tutorials, LMAO:
They even have Army ASMR, LMAOOO:
LMAO, you'd better not post this video in /r/DogsWithJobs! (those of you who were reading my posts on KF in the Bardfinn thread, y'all know that this inside joke is in reference to)
Now, to answer the question, there are many reasons why Gen Z doesn't want to join the military.
As Upkin mentions in his video, Gen Z was promised a Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism that originated from and extended into the military. They were lied to and told that AI would automate away all the jobs, including all the military jobs, and war would become one country's Skynet versus another country's Skynet. They were told for decades that the future of warfare is going to be sitting in the safety of an office at the other side of the world bombing helpless brown people with a drone... only to discover in the War in Ukraine that warfare in the 21st century is exactly like warfare in the 20th: trench warfare and "meat grinders". Not very hi-tech, definitely not sexy.
Another reason Gen Z is scared of joining the military is because of mass gun violence and the anti-gun backlash that has fostered in the general public. In the old days, more young people grew up around guns, learned to use guns, and trusted their abilities to use them effectively. Gen Z is too traumatized by public school shootings and literally none of the adults around them fighting back to save them, to have a romantic idea about their ability to handle a foe with a gun.
Another reason I suspect Gen Z is scared of joining the military is, yes, video games, especially FPS and strategy games. People for years warned that playing these increasingly more graphic games at increasingly younger ages would make Gen Z more violent, but the opposite seems to have happened: Gen Z knows intuitively that violence in reality is nothing like violence in a computer game. This is related to the first reason: Gen Z was lied to that modern warfare was going to be like sitting in your room playing a video games, only to discover that it's the same it ever was. All those gamers who currently trad-LARP about being survivalists have likely never actually joined a militia to learn how to function in a group, have never been exposed to military levels of discipline, and can't deal with how unpredictable reality is as opposed to a computer game.
Lastly, the general "fuck you, got mine" attitude of this generation means that there isn't much self-sacrifice or heroism to go around.
