Modern Recruits: Informed and Skeptical

Western militaries are facing a recruitment problem that has become impossible to ignore.

Numbers are down across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom,

and much of Europe. This has produced many convenient explanations—young people are lazy,

too online, or simply uninterested in responsibility. Unfortunately for these narratives,

there is a simpler, more grounded explanation: modern recruits are far more informed, far more objective,

and, inconveniently, far better at Googling the risks of military service than any

generation before them. The first issue is that modern warfare has changed dramatically,

and potential recruits have front-row seats courtesy of every social platform known to man.