Recruiting is a growing problem for the branches of the Military. If the state of the “battle” continues on it’s current path - it will prove to be somewhat insurmountable.

The real problem lies with the “skillz” needed by our soldiers, airmen, seaman (and Marines), as well as coasties. Where the military has typically “trained” to reach the required performance - the cost to do so is growing beyond the ability to recover the investment within four years.

Obviously I’m really only addressing the problem as it relates to “technical” skillsets…like Math and Science. For example…I’m a high school student excelling in Mathematics and Science (possibly Computer Science). I have the choice of either attending a four year school, graduating, getting a job making 65K/year; attending a four year school, graduating, getting commissioned as an officer and making ~32K/year; or enlisting and earning ~17K/for the first year. Here’s the real problem. It would take almost 8 years from the military route’s pay to double…assuming “good” behavior. If I were an exceptional professional I could double my pay within 5 - easily.

Air Force’s Cyber Command recruiting commercial does an excruciatingly painful job at trying to be cool to this crowd. The first problem with this…is that it shows “operators” clicking on a touch screen. Operators are literally just that. What it doesn’t address is the intelligence that is really required…the engineering mindset (social or technical).

Also, operators don’t develop the systems (really no one serving does) - federal contractors do. The “touch screen” technology as well as the command and control applications are an example of such a case. The military branches are also competing with the folks that actually engineer the stuff. However, having served in the Air Force I know there is a lot more to operating and maintaining - thus the fairly lengthy technical schooling session plus constant on-the-job training. And, back to my original assertion that from an investment perspective this may be an insurmountable problem.

This Air Force commercial is a little better - but, notice that the guy is a captain. The majority of the people in the video are not. The reality is that our Air Force’s “network” war is being fought by high-school graduates.