• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    That’s probably like 60 percent of it. They’ve definitely got internal problems like their sexual assault, suicide, and burn out rates. Also it can be a pretty toxic environment if you aren’t a lean runner body type or don’t conform to their culture. There’s also a gang problem on some bases. So yeah, they have bad things going on even without politicians giving them screwed up orders.

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Fair, it’s basically somewhere between school and prison so those kind of environments breed that behavior, hard to keep that many young men together doing physical effort without the hormones getting unpleasant.

      Still, other countries often handle it better so it’s clearly possible, we also should raise our recruitment standards but the war on terror put paid to that.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        We actually tried to raise our standards. Or rather, we stopped scraping the barrel under Obama. Biden then tried to digitalize the medical in processing. That had the effect of not allowing people to hide their previous medical adventures anymore. That’s why recruiting fell off a cliff for a couple years and all those scare mongering headlines got printed. Thankfully most of the issues were stuff they wanted to waiver in anyway, like childhood asthma that’s no longer bothering the recruit. The problem was people had to wait months for those waivers and by then they had already moved on. So now the waivers are fast and we’re filling the ranks again, with a digital system preventing real medical issues from making it through.

        But yeah, they stopped the “anything breathing” policy around 2010.

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I knew it got better after ’THE SURGE!!!', but thought the recovering economy didn’t help as there were other jobs.