Education is unattainable now for kids who grow up in poverty. You go from the prospect of living at home while working at Walmart and having no future, to a promise of getting job training, health care (such as it is), room and board, and a pension. Where the fuck else are you getting a pension as a kid who grew up in poverty? Maybe as a cop. The military is a way out for many.
You should listen to the kids who enlisted pre-911 talk about it. They literally say they did it to go to college, not war. Things are not quite as innocent now, but I seriously doubt the current enlistees thought Asshat Hegseth was in their future.
National guard, until this admin, did cool things like sandbagging to help with domestic flooding, search/rescue, evac. FEMA used to do cool things. During Covid, they deployed national guard nurses and nurse practitioners to help staff overwhelmed hospitals (to states whose governors acknowledged the reality of the problem).
And let’s be real, home defense against whatever, including any pot shots by any successes on the N Korean front is nice.
To say it’s 100% bad is ignorant. There are few 100%s with people.
What is largely bad and a significant piece of the gross overspending are the contractors. They rake it in while military families can find themselves on food stamps. Bernie breaks it down if you’re at all interested in details.