Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/25/22 John Vaughn on Why People Aren’t Joining the Military

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Scott spoke with retired U.S. Army Captain John Vaughn about the Military’s recent recruitment troubles. Vaughn gives an insider’s take on why interest in joining up has been dropping and highlights some relevant statistics. He reflects on his own experience enrolling at West Point before deploying to Kuwait, Afghanistan and Poland.  Discussed on the show: “Evacuation Eyewitness: What I Saw in Kabul” (Libertarian Institute) “A Veteran Explains Why People Aren’t Joining the Military” (Libertarian Institute) “Every branch of the military is struggling to make its 2022 recruiting goals, officials say” (NBC News) John Vaughn is a retired United States Army Captain. He graduated from West Point in 2013 and commissioned as an Infantry officer before becoming an Information Technology Systems Engineer for the U.S. Army. He has served as a Platoon Leader at Fort Bliss, TX, as a Company Commander at Fort Benning, GA, and as an instructor at the Army’s Officer Candidate School. He has deployed to Kuwait, Afghanistan and Poland and has been published in the Army’s Signal Magazine. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing john vaughn he was a captain in the u.s army and he's out now but you might remember he came on the show last year to talk about the aftermath of the afghan

withdrawal and the suicide attack at the airport in Kabul and all of that and wrote a great piece about it for the Libertarian Institute, which we took down because he got in trouble with the bosses, but now he put back up because he's out. So you can find all that at the Libertarian Institute. And then he's got a new article. A veteran explains why people aren't joining the military. Welcome back to the show, John. How are you doing? Hey, thank you very much, Scott, for having me back on. Happy to have you here. Hey, um, so. So first of all, tell us why you joined the military in the first place and how many years you spend in and which wars you were in and so forth and what all it was like.

Yeah, absolutely. So I joined the military right out of high school. I left high school and went to West Point or the United States Military Academy, which is the Service Academy that graduates soldiers into the Army. And so I kind of always knew growing up, I grew up in a conservative household in the south, south of Atlanta, and was kind of in a area that had a lot of veterans. And I knew I wanted to join the military because I had kind of this patriotic duty that I felt. And, you know, I was kind of the guy that, you know, I played sports and was athletic and competitive. and I enjoyed that kind of competition and physical competitiveness. And really, I mean, frankly, like, you know, there's not a lot of places in the, you know,

in the world where you can go and be physically intense and, like, do violence, basically. And besides being like a cop. And I wanted to join the military so that I could fight and serve my country and do all of the above. So after graduating from West Point, I commissioned as an infantry officer because I wanted to get out there in the front lines and do the fighting. But I graduated a little bit after the kind of major waves of the war on terror. And I also went to a unit that didn't deploy to the combat zones so much, an armored unit. And so I went to Kuwait on a non-combat rotation once, and then after going to the 82nd Airborne division, I was activated and went to Kabul last year, as you referenced. And I also deployed earlier this year to Poland as part of the reaction to the Russian invasion there.

But now I'm out of the Army, and I'm glad to be here. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're out too. And now, so obviously the narrative, well, first of all, the news is that recruitment is down. And they even were saying, well, forget high school. You can go with just a GED, although I think they backed down on that one. Maybe. But this is a problem, and it's getting headlines.

And, of course, the easy answer is, and there must be some truth to this, right? That's because of all of this woke crap. You try to brainwash a bunch of guys, as you just described, a bunch of guys who just want to fight. and now you got to put them through sensitivity training and all this stuff and they just don't want anything to do with it. But you're saying, what, is that part of it at all or not? I would say that it's definitely part of it, right? It's part of like the background noise of why a person wants to join the military, right? Like, you know, when you're talking about the sorts of people that they're looking for, right?

In large part, they're looking for people who are committed, patriotic, that want to, you know, want to be involved in kind of the camaraderie. And I'm talking about like the ideal candidates, not who ends up actually joining, right? And they want people who are basically committed to doing violence on behalf of the state. And, you know, those types of people tend to be in our kind of current world, kind of right-leaning conservative people. And lots of, there's lots of surveys and data that show that the vast majority of, it might not be the vast majority, but a large majority of military, especially the Army and combat arms

come from the South and they come from conservative leaning areas. So that's definitely in the background noise of people's decisions to join the military. But I, well, and by the way, on that, on that point, just how woke is the Army and how woke is the Marine Corps these days anyway? And what is it, what exactly does that mean? I mean, is there really like, it's like going to Brown University to go to boot camp? So I, no, it's not like that. It's more like it's, I would say that the military follows many of the other institutions in America by, you know, maybe a decade or so.

So what's happened in recent years is that the, what's effectively the HR department of the army is kind of finally starting to. adopt some of the things that have been around in corporate America for 10 or so years where you do get sensitivity training there is that kind of stuff

and most soldiers I would say you know they don't really necessarily they might grumble about it a little bit but this transformation has been going on for over a decade I mean you remember Obama you know got rid of don't ask don't tell which is the first kind of major

I would say major event that that you could point to as evidence of this transformation occurring. But it's not like going to Brown University. There's still a lot of high intensity kind of culture and stuff like that that trails it considerably. But you know, that's not the stuff that goes on TV and you know a lot of people see the stuff that the big public pronouncements and take that as the you know what's going on and maybe it will be in five years who knows yeah pretty easy answer and i guess all other things being equal i can imagine some heavy eye rolling at you know being inculcated with a bunch of leftist doctrine about identity politics and this and that crap but you know as a means to an end exactly

Yeah, I still get to drive a tank, right? I mean, we're talking about boys. That's exactly right, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, it's like, it's kind of things that are distract. People tend to think of it as like distractions from the other stuff. You know, I'm still jumping out of airplanes. I'm still driving tanks and shooting machine guns and stuff.

And that's my real mission. That's kind of how most. Which sounds great. If it was just peacetime and we weren't, you know, actually, you know, fighting all the time for nothing. I want to jump out of things. Yeah, it's pretty, um, I've been skydiving a couple times and it's really a lot of fun. And I, you know what I really want to do? I want to fly F-18 like a top gun, but I just don't want to shoot anything at anybody,

you know? Yeah, absolutely. And so that's kind of, you know, so in, if that was all we were doing, it might be one thing. But that's kind of what you're always planning to do and always training to do is to actually go out there and fight. And, you know, many soldiers do kind of feel like an, uh, an urge to go out and, do what they've been training for. But the reality of it is that it turns out that the past couple of decades have taken a serious toll on our fighting men and women, you know, and have kind of shown them that,

you know, it's not all, you know, it's not all heroism and movies and high-fiving when you land back on the aircraft carrier. Yeah. Now, I was just going to wrap up on the woke part there. To me, it's just a silver lining of people say, you know, I don't want government. employment of any kind if it means I got to sit there and listen to all of this leftist crap then good they should all get real jobs because we actually don't have any real enemies we'll let them know when we need them but uh so that to me is just you know silver lining on this

crazy uh you know ideological storm running through here but uh so to the real point though is what you just said which is that actually we got a generation of catastrophe in the middle east and even though TV has turned away, a lot of guys have noticed, including the millions of Americans who've been to Iraq and Afghanistan, especially, and back. And plus just, you know, know of all of the CIA and Air Force and whoever's antics in Yemen and Libya and Syria, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely.

And so, you know, you're exactly right. After doing this for 20 years and being in this kind of brutal conflict and seeing horrifying things, you know, It ends up taking a toll on people. You know, there's a tremendous amount of damage that has been occurred to the U.S. military as a result of our involvement in here. And so one of the things I talk about in my article, and that's borne out by data, actually on the same day that my article was published, a fantastic article by Zero Hedge came out, giving some data about who joins the military. and why. And so, for example, one of the statistics cited in it is that about 79% of recruits have a relative who have served in the military. Now, one of the other things that's noted in this article

is that the number of people who recommend serving in the military to a relative has decreased and the number in the past couple of years and the number of people who do not recommend joining the military to a relative has increased. So we've got this narrowing, and that's just in the past couple of years since 2019. So we've got this dynamic where people who have relatives in the military or friends and close associates and role models who are in the military are giving them kind of a balanced view about what military life actually means for a for a potential young recruit you know when you're when you're when you're a young guy right or a young guy or girl right and you're thinking about joining the military you're doing it kind of

really for one of two reasons and and this is borne out by the data also you know you're either doing it because you are committed and you want to serve in the military you want to serve your country right or you're doing it because the the kind of pecuniary benefits right you get your college paid for. You get a guaranteed paycheck. Maybe you have a relative or a spouse or a child that needs medical care. In fact, there's a new movie on Netflix that just came out where I haven't watched it yet, but that's the whole premise is that somebody joins the military so that they can get health care. And that happens more than I can tell you. And people stay in for that long, but for that same reason. So, you know, those are the kind of the two reasons that people join the

military. And among people that are motivated to serve the country, you know, that's hugely influenced by their role models, right? So growing up, you know, I was surrounded by and grew up in a community where there was a lot of fighter pilots and former Air Force and Navy aviators. And those guys, man, like those are some real cool dudes like you were talking about, you know, like real life fighter pilots and they kind of are the platonic ideal of what a what a serve being a service member looks like and so you know if I had had you know and talking with them I got that kind of that experience of yeah the military you know has all these things and it does you get all these opportunities and you get to do cool stuff you know and

So I got to see a lot of the positive side. But now that the war on terror has progressed so long and so many people have so many injuries, both physical and psychological, it started to trickle out into the kind of public sphere and into the kind of over-10 window that, hey, maybe serving in the military isn't all, you know, metals and ribbons, right? Maybe there's the real serious likelihood that I could be harmed. in the NBC article that I cite, one of the things that they mentioned as a concern

is that in the Army's internal surveys, it notes that more than half of young Americans who answered the survey, about 57% think they would have emotional or psychological problems after serving in the military. Then hilariously, the Army responds to that data with essentially hand-waving, saying, well, you know,

they're just not familiar with what military service actually contributes. To me, that's kind of a non-sequitur. How can it both be true that almost 80% of people have a relative who served and they're unfamiliar with it? It just doesn't make sense to me. But, you know, what else can the military respond with? How else can they explain this dramatic decline in the past couple of years and really the past decade of recruitment. Yeah, it's not all the anti-war propaganda on TV, right? People are

getting this information, just like you are saying there, from their own family members, just as the polls document. Absolutely. And think about the, you know, after a 9-11, for example, there was an enormous recruiting push and even through, and enormous numbers of people joining the military, you know, with the media drumming it up. And even during the early parts of the Iraq war and Afghan war, recruiting, uh, didn't suffer until things started to get really bad. Now we have a real conflict going on in Ukraine and with Russia that threatens to spell out and you've got the media banging the war drums constantly. Same thing in Taiwan, but people aren't responding to it. Why aren't they joining?

Well, it might be because they understand a little bit better what military service is about. Maybe they don't believe in it in the same way that they, or they don't feel the same level of patriotic duty to defend Ukraine or Taiwan from aggression. Give me just a minute here. Listen, I don't know about you guys, but part of running the Libertarian Institute is sending out tons of books and other things to our donors. And who wants to stand in line all day at the post office? But stamps.com?

Sorry, but their website is a total disaster. I couldn't spend another minute on it. But I don't have to either, because there's easyship.com. Easyship.com is like stamps.com, but their webbed. website isn't terrible. Go to Scott Horton.org slash easy ship. Hey, y'all Scott here. You know the Libertarian Institute has published a few great books. Mine, Bulls Arrind, enough already, and the great Ron Paul. Two, by our executive editor Sheldon Richmond, coming to Palestine and what social animals owe to each other. And of course,

no quarter, the ravings of William Norman Grigg, our late-great co-founder and managing editor at the Institute. Coming very soon in the new year will be the excellent voluntarious handbook edited by Keith Knight, a new collection of my interviews about nuclear weapons, one more collection of essays by Will Grigg, and two new books about Syria by the great William Van Wagonen and Brad Hoff and his co-author Zachary Wingard. That's Libertarian Institute.org slash books. Yeah, well, so it was funny. I was talking with Matt Taibi about this earlier, and he was joking about how, you know, the liberals, you know, I was talking about how the liberals won't go fights, all the right wingers who would go and do the fighting. And if they don't believe it anymore,

that's a real problem for the war machine. And he was joking. Yeah, now the liberals, they go on to be officers, you know, so ha-ha, that's a dig at you, dude. But, uh, so you went to West Point and became a captain, but your intent was to go out there and fight. And then I know you saw some ugly stuff in Afghanistan. Was it just the airport or you were in Afghanistan for how long? So I was in the, I was in the, uh, 80 second airborne's activation to, uh, respond and complete the evacuation. Uh, I was, uh, I was there for a total of 14 days and it was the longest two weeks of my life. Um, and, uh, I was on, uh, the second to last plane out of, out of Afghanistan. Wow. Yeah. Um, and, and, and that's enough for you, huh?

there was a there was a lot of reasons for me deciding to leave the military that that was uh that was definitely one of them uh you know i i'd like i'll point people to you know my other article that i wrote about it um you know it was pretty uh you know there was there was a lot that happened it was pretty traumatic i'm i'm proud of my soldiers you know and what they did uh but and and what we accomplished with what we had uh but it was kind of a disaster uh already we did the best with what we had yeah that's so interesting you just see in the very last chapter of the last chapter of that generation long catastrophe up close like that you know really interesting yeah yeah it was um you know it probably would have happened like that no matter when we got out

you know whether it was five years ago or five years from now but uh you know it just you know i happen to be there at the at the wrong time uh in the wrong place yeah well you know i'm proud of the fact that a lot of veterans listen to this show and like it and i've made a lot of friends that way and um you know i haven't had anybody say no man i've been at the warm back and you don't know what the hell you're talking about that's never happened yet and um it's always the other way around in fact i met a guy in san marcus at a speech i gave to the Libertarian Party, Mises Caucus. And he said he was an officer in special operations forces,

like essentially this whole time, stationed in the Gulf there somewhere. And he said, he read my book, and he said he could vouch for almost all of it. And the rest of it, he was thankful that he learned that stuff from me. And that was, that was it. And, but so that I'll tell you a lot, because I'm not a vet and I'm not a guy who's been to the wars. I'm essentially a pirate radio host. you know, Ramando sidekick at anti-war.com who just paid attention to this stuff

and opposed it all this whole time. And then, you know, what I got to say to these guys rings true that this is, and I guess to you, that this is what's really going on here, guys. Sorry. It is. And so, you know, they, like,

you are able to discuss with a clarity things that are very difficult for soldiers to about themselves or to acknowledge themselves, you know, with many of the soldiers and veterans that I, you know, I spent nearly all of my time in the military, in the combat arms, in the infantry. And if I wasn't in the infantry, then I was in the 82nd Airborne Division doing, you know, kind of high-speed stuff. But it kind of always fell into like two camps as far as people's opinion on, you know, the things that they had done. And so for frame of reference, my term of service was in the early, from the early 2010s until, you know, just earlier this year.

So, you know, the one camp is people who, who knew and, like, were troubled by their, by their, like, experiences and the things that they did and what we you know what I keep saying we I need to break that habit but the things that the U.S. military did overseas and you know went along with it because it's their job and they like it that you know they like their job they like the camaraderie and stuff and being part of a community or be the people who knew it was terrible and just didn't care you know I'll always remember one you know discussion with a with a soldier that I had, you know, an NCO who, you know, I talked to, I was talking to him about it. And, you know, he was like, man, I really want to go back to Afghanistan. I was like,

what? Really? Why do you want to go back? He was like, man, I just love fighting. And so it's like, okay, well, I mean, I guess that's, I guess that's a reason, even if it's not a good reason. And, you know, like, all we got left. It sure is hell ain't fighting for freedom here or women's rights there or any of that crap. So it must be something. It's a this guy wants, to shoot at something okay and so you know and send them to the range man that's that is some people you know that's not everybody that was far from that was far from normal and that's why i remember it uh but you know there's uh you know there's a you know there's a large number of people who are upset with the things that they've done and or the things that they've experienced and you know like what kind of and

that that leads out to bear that bears on the recruiting problem too you know where like hey like you know, if somebody's in a small town, right, and they know somebody's father is a, you know, is a veteran or whatever, and they struggle with or are openly critical of the wars and the things that they've done, you know, what kind of message does that send to a person who might want to, who might otherwise want to join the military? Yeah. You know, maybe they'd be, maybe they end up being better off working on an oil rig or something else. They might be, you know, completely stoic about it too, but still recognize the truth.

of it all. You know, you don't necessarily have to carry around a bag of guilt all the time that you believed your president and your dad and your gym coach and everybody told you this was the right thing to do, you know? Yeah. And we're talking about 17 and 18 year old boys, which as a 46-year-old, I can tell you, it's still just a kid. So regardless of, you know, the technicality. I remember when I turned 18 thinking I was a grown-up now, but that's kind of silly when I think back on it now. but so anyway i you know i don't i certainly don't hold individual soldiers responsible for american foreign policy but you know it is important that we take the opportunity to make sure that kids do have the opportunity to know better and i have met people who have told me that they were

going to join the army in fact they were even in some cases days or weeks away from joining the army and then they found out about my stuff and then decided not to so i really like those too it's a real thing yeah and you know it's funny I wonder if you remark about this I think I babbled about this in a recent interview so sorry if I'm being a redone everybody but

isn't it weird how there's this kind of bifurcation where even if Bill Clinton or W. Bush or Obama or Trump or Biden or somebody like that is your president and even though everybody knows the wars are all BS and everyone knows that the greatest conspiracy theory of all was coined by Ike Eisenhower

the five-star general turned two-term most highly respected president or second place after FDR, I guess, most respected president of the 20th century, who said that, yeah, the arms industries have an interest in keeping the wars going, if you understand, and take my meeting here. And everybody knows that that's the American system, that our government's completely captured by the arms industry and all of that. And for that matter, our media and all the think tanks are, too. And everybody knows And yet, the whole thing about all of green and red, white, and blue, and serve in your country, and your granddad did it too, and honor and valor, and all the martial virtues of being a tough guy who protects weaker people and all this Superman stuff, all that stuff is still true anyway, even though everybody knows that we got an empire, and everybody knows that our system is completely corrupt, and everybody knows that our commanders in chief are scum, not. you know worth i mean who would what would you hire them for if you were in business any of these

guys but you'll follow them into war with a foreign nation you know and it's just um it's this uh you know to me even for a teenager i think that there there's got to be some real dissonance there like somewhere you heard before that it is not supposed to be like this right yeah yeah definitely And, you know, there's still going to be people, you know, 17, 18 years old who are going to, they hear those things. But a lot of that is kind of, and to them, it's almost like, you know, that's why I say it's kind of background, right? It's all the background to their decision where it's still very highly personal. That's the adult's problem, right? Yeah, that's the democracy's problem.

For you, it's whether you can do enough push-ups to make the cut, right? That's all it's about is your own movie that you're starring. in, right? And I want to join, and I want to join because, you know, I get, I get a, get to get out of the house, you know, I get to get out of the, get out of my situation, you know. And that's, that's the, that's the case for lots of people. And, and, you know, really, even like, we're just talking about the enlisted folks on this, you know, officers have a kind of different rationale for joining. You know, I would say, you know, one of the, one of the jobs that I did in, the military was I was a trainer I was a trainer for officer candidate school which is where you would go if you were an enlisted person trying to become an officer or didn't go to ROTC or a service academy and I would say that probably I would say all the people that were coming to become an officer were doing it for career reasons rather than just like purely economic ones you know a lot of people had college debt and stuff like that which is one way that which is one way the military gets people in. And in fact, actually, I don't know if you remember, but one of the things that people talked about when the forgiving student loan kind of drama

was going on a few months ago, the military came out and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't know if we should go forward with this because it might impact our ability to get people to join the military if we forgive student loans. So they realize like, you know, we're relying on desperate people to fill the ranks. And, you know, it's kind of a, it's just kind of a mess,

you know, and especially senior officers have an extremely perverse incentive to continue the military, you know, continue wars and things because where do those senior officers get jobs after they get out of the military? They go straight into that military industrial complex, you know, it kind of is a, it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing, and it's hard to extricate that and break that cycle. for people. Yeah, exactly right. Well, and you can see, too, where there was such a financial incentive in boosting this Ukraine war that, look, oh, no, we pulled out of Afghanistan. I think it leaked that the CEO of Raytheon complained on his investor conference call that, man, we're really taking

a hit with the end of the Afghan war here. We're looking for opportunities, you know? And then, lo and behold, hey, look, an opportunity. And we got complete consensus and tons of cash. being passed around. The Quincy Institute just actually ran a great thing about the Ukraine lobbyists, but where's all that money coming from? That's all our money in the first place, most of it, you know? And it's another great irony as well is that, you know, something you've talked about before where you've said that you're concerned that pulling out of Afghanistan and the Middle East would free up resources for other wars. Well, guess what? That's where we are. And now we're running the risk of all those soldiers dying in a nuclear holocaust instead of just, you know, getting stuck in deploying and shooting a peasant.

I wouldn't take too much credit. I think they've got some incentives of their own to have ended those wars. But you've definitely impacted people like me and the sorts of people who matter. well i hope that's right and yeah i really hope that i didn't play a role and getting all a humanity killed but that is something honestly that i considered that from the time i was even before i got too interested in being an activist of any kind i was still just a teenager probably you're like very early 20s they're like yeah you know you never really know what's going to happen and you could see pretty easily they're like eh having our military if

they absolutely have to be doing something and i can't not turn that off maybe it is better that they're patrolling helpless postumes in the helman province than picking a fight with a major power that can hit us all back the way that they are not that it's fair to sacrifice these poor people but now look at where we're at we could end up killing hundreds of millions of people in a day in a war with russia you know yep and it could And there's so many different ways that it could spiral out of control. Well, listen, actually, why don't you give us a word about that? How's tensions in Poland these days, man?

So a lot of that, you know, I was there for a relatively brief time for the first, like, month or two, you know, during the initial part of the invasion. And it was a pretty intense. I won't go into specifics about it. but you know it was pretty intense for a couple of weeks and then after that it kind of became clear that whatever we went over there to do we were not going to do and I don't know exactly what those details were I was far too low on the like chain to like understand what was happening back there but the the bigger point is that you know there's a lot of soldiers there and there's a lot of people that are that are ready in the event that something gets worse.

And as long as they're there, that increases the possibility that things get worse and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. Have mercy. I hope not. Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you writing for the Institute, John, and for coming on the show. It's great stuff. Thank you very much, Scott. I really appreciate it.

All right, you guys, that is a former Army captain, now retired. John Vaughn, writing at the Libertarian Institute. A veteran explains why people aren't joining the military. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.