https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1jbpw1i/german_army_struggles_to_get_gen_z_recruits_ready/
From the article:
As a podcaster and freelance journalist, Ole Nymoen admits he enjoys freedom of expression and other democratic rights in his home country of Germany.
But he would not want to die for them.
In a book published this week, ✨Why I Would Never Fight for My Country✨, the 27-year-old argues ordinary people should not be sent into battle on behalf of nation states and their rulers — even to fend off an invasion. Occupation by a foreign power might lead to a “shitty” life, he told the Financial Times. “But I’d rather be occupied than dead.”
Nymoen, a self-described Marxist 🤣, does not claim to be representative of Generation Z in Germany. But his stance — and his striking honesty about it — taps into a wider questions facing Europe as it re-arms on a scale not seen since the end of the cold war.
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Germany’s armed forces commissioner, Eva Högl, this week warned the country was not closer to its goal of having 203,000 active troops by 2031, as the overall size of the armed forces slightly declined last year, partly because of a high number of dropouts. A quarter of the 18,810 men and women who signed up in 2023 left the armed forces within six months.
“This development must be stopped and reversed as a matter of urgency,” Högl said.
A Bundeswehr spokesperson told the FT the military had taken steps to try to stem the outflow of young recruits, including a notice period to avoid “last-minute, emotional” decisions.
But one senior army commander said members of Generation Z — renowned in the business world for their efforts to reshape corporate culture — were also going into the armed forces with different ideas and outlooks. “People are vulnerable, they cry easily,” he said. “They talk about work-life balance.” 🧘♂️
“I understand that,” the commander added. “They grew up in a different time. It’s not a bad perspective. But it doesn’t match that well with a wartime situation.”
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Are you prepared to discuss work life balance with Sgt during the Russia attack? Sir the conditions are unacceptable, WiFi signal is too weak for TikTok and where is my Yerba mate meditation break? 🧘♂️🧉
But one senior army commander said members of Generation Z — renowned in the business world for their efforts to reshape corporate culture — were also going into the armed forces with different ideas and outlooks. “People are vulnerable, they cry easily,” he said. “They talk about work-life balance.” 🧘♂️
It is good gen-z is vulnerable and gen-z men are actually taught how to be vulnerable, cry and express their suffering through avenues other than violence.
Has this fuck ever been in brutal combat and watched close friends be obscenely ripped from life right in front of his eyes? Has this fuck ever spent time talking to vets with severe PTSD?
Fuck this guy ( -> “But one senior army commander said members of Generation Z — renowned in the business world for their efforts to reshape corporate culture” ), war isnt about being a tough guy who doesn’t feel anything, you are a shit soldier if you do that because your mental health and acuity goes to shit when you don’t deal with trauma like toxic masculine cultures almost always don’t.
There is a difference between developing the skill to temporarily partition your emotions in combat and lobotimizing or actively making fun of a mature honest relationship with your emotions and never willingly expressing them.
Fools like this guy conflate the two, which ends up creating a silly logical paradox where they argue that practicing taking deep breaths is bad preparation for holding your breath to freedive and that right before you dive you should hyperventilate with shallow breaths to get yourself ready for the experience of having no oxygen in your lungs.
It isn’t that complicated, war among many other awful catastrophic things is a massive stress on your mental health (extreme boredom punctuated by extreme stress). To be an effective fighting force therefor requires teaching soldiers the importance of the emotional labor and practiced vulnerability required to get a soldier BACK to a point of health that they can effectively and sustainably fight.
… and to anybody that responds that militaries can compel soldiers to fight whether they want to or not… yes but especially in modern peer-to-peer conflict with highly professional militaries a genuine motivation of soldiers to fight trumps almost everything else. A massive army of unmotivated soldiers is only useful as political propaganda, it cannot fight a modern combined arms war effectively. Things happen WAY too fast and unpredictably in war to continue to aggressively push into those spaces without a genuine desire and ability to heal, process and build yourself and others back up from nearly shattered states of being.
Bread and circuses. He an idiot.