The Angry Staff Officer has a good post up over at The Strategy Bridge about recruiting Millennials for the 21st Century Army.
The so-called “Me Generation” gets a lot of bad press. A simple Google search of “Millennial” will bring up keywords such as, lazy, self-obsessed, and narcissistic. None of these are qualities you want in a military servicemember. However, this stereotype, like all stereotypes, fails to paint a full picture. Consider that the majority of servicemembers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan as company grade officers and below are Millennials. Despite the social media memes questioning whether Millennials would have the guts to hop off a landing craft on Omaha Beach during the 1944 D-Day invasion, Millennials have fought, bled, and died in fierce combat from Fallujah to Marjah. If you take 1982 as the beginning of the Millennial generation, six out of the eleven servicemembers to be awarded the Medal of Honor for operations in Afghanistan have been Millennials. There is no lack of fighting spirit.
It’s worth your time to read the whole thing.
As with any generation, there are some great folks eager to serve. TASO points out that a propensity to some sort of service is strong in the Millennials, and good recruiting can convert that into a propensity to serve in uniform.
That’s not to say there aren’t some awful Millenials.
**click at your own risk**
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We sometimes forget that this... thing... is only in the news because they are so outside the mainstream. We forget that they are emblematic of the fringe, not the mainstream.
For my money, the real challenge with recruiting for the 21st Century isn’t the Millennials attitude, but rather atrocious physical fitness of the generation as a whole.
TASO brings up one other point I want to address.
Some might complain that Millennials make poor employees since their experience they always want to know the “why” and “so what” behind each task. Rather than seeing this as a downside, leaders can exploit this as an opportunity to create a desire to be more involved in the organization, to generate what some might call buy in.”
For the most part, as a leader, I loved it when a junior soldier would as me “why?” The Army does a lot of things that aren’t always exactly intuitive. And while some things it does are objectively stupid, or “that’s just the way we’ve always done it” usually, there’s a reason the Army does things the way they do. Those reasons just tend not to be immediately visible at the lowest levels of the organization.
Having been around the Army a while, I was often able to glean, through reading of field manuals and various regulations, why some task was performed the way it was. And I was happy to share that with my soldiers. And as my soldiers understood that what they were doing wasn’t, in fact, pointless, but legitimate, they tended to perform those tasks better.
As an added bonus, when I simply didn’t have the time to explain to them why something had to be done, they could take it on faith that there was, in fact, a reason.
When short of time...make it happen. Explanations have to wait.7
Posted by: SFC Dunlap 173d RVN | 04/28/2016 at 02:20 PM