Hi everybody, Cheryl Ackison here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure After

Hours. Today we discuss America's military recruiting crisis, missing recruiting goals

for the first time since we converted to an all-volunteer force 50 years ago.

We have been sending billions of dollars in aid and munitions and all kinds of stuff to Ukraine

and now to Israel while some critics say we've been letting our own national security,

our own military force, languish in some ways. You know that I talk about and write about information

and manipulation quite a bit. This is sort of an aside that if you do a Google search for aid to Ukraine,

you will come up with all kinds of results and news articles that all tell you how great it is

and how necessary it is for the United States to send as much aid as Ukraine supposedly needs

for, quote, as long as it takes. You will not find the criticism and there's plenty of it,

at least it's not showing up in my search results. One of the criticisms is that we're sending things to Ukraine

that other countries have paid for and were in line to receive from us.

So Ukraine has gotten bumped to the top of the list at the expense of some of our allies.

Additionally critics say some of the support that we are sending to Ukraine is leaving us depleted.

For example, the US ammunition stockpiles were said to be uncomfortably low

according to a defense official some months ago when it came to one type of combat rounds

and analysts say that's the circumstance with other things as well.

But today we're going to talk about the state of the US military when it comes to recruiting.

We're putting all this focus on helping other countries and many people would agree that we should do that

and yet is enough attention being paid to the things that are making us less strong.

So 50 years ago, July 1st, 1973, the Army instituted the all-volunteer force.

That ended the draft which had gone on for 23 years.

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