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if I say what you should actually do to your brother,I would be banned

(CW: discussion of SA)

This is a topic I'm trying to be more informed about; as a vet I'm trying to keep every young person I know out of the US military.

I always like to start off by saying that the military will lie to you every step of the way, from the time you contact the recruiter until the VA denies your claim. All anyone at any step of the way is motivated to do is hit their numbers/quotas, regardless of you. Recruiters and detailers have a certain number of certain billets to fill, and they will slot you in one regardless of what you want. Recruiters can tell you you'll be assigned to Combat Camera as a photographer, but then at boot camp you find out you're going into infantry. Even if you're smart, diligent, and read the contracts and fine print, they will find a way to screw you. In any investigation while in, they will do their best to deny you your rights and railroad you into admitting guilt at a non-judicial Article 15 hearing (where evidence is not required and hearsay is accepted) rather than a court martial.

Especially for femme people considering joining (mascs should also be aware and care), I always bring up Sexual Assault statistics. You can find official reports here (warning: US government website) https://www.sapr.mil/reports But, also actual numbers are 2-4 times higher than the US government estimates. On a more personal note, my cousin was sexually assaulted by the same man as multiple others at their command (who was never convicted), and suffers from severe enough PTSD that they're 100% disabled (and was physically assaulted by a VA police officer at a VA hospital). I lost a friend at my last command who was sexually assaulted by their superior, and I still hate that I couldn't do anything about it all these years later.

It is a machine that eats able-bodied young people and shits out MIC contractors and broken husks.

GI Rights Hotline has some resources about this.
https://girightshotline.org/en/military-knowledge-base/truth-in-recruiting/

The Quakers have some resources as well:
https://quakerhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/QH_SgtAbeApr2015.pdf

I will try to keep updating this with more resources as I find them.

I finally figured out that the best search engine query is "counter recruitment"

By We Are Not Your Soldiers, a group of antiwar veterans that speak in classrooms
https://www.beforeenlisting.org/home

I sympathize with your brother and his motivations for joining the military but shit, not many destitute people have the opportunity to go live with their brother in a foreign country with everything paid for, so I do think some guilty conscience is merited

"my moral code is also not nearly as strong as yours,

Ask if he would shoot a child if someone asked him to, or cover up a friend being SA'd to save his own skin. What does he think the military is? Free bed and breakfast in an exotic tourist spot?

Men think that they will get some masculinity reset by joining the military when working a service job at McDonalds is far more brave and respectable.

Your brother's commentary reminds me a lot of this recent article:

Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE.

The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/two-days-talking-to-people-looking-for-jobs-at-ice/

I need the security and discipline that it will provide while I try to find something to dedicate myself to

This is a common misconception. The military does not give you discipline, it just screams you into compliance for the duration of your contract. When you return to the civilian world you will be the exact same person you are now, just with tinnitus (or worse) and four to five years older.

That "four to five years older" part is the secret killer. You'll go to college with kids four to five years younger than you, join the workforce with four to five years less experience, etc. The military will try to tell you that your service experience will be an advantage, but this is a lie. Your time spent in the military will be an albatross hanging on your neck. There's a reason why US vet homelessness is so high, and it's not because military service looks great on a resume.

Tell him he'll be much, much better off spending those four to five years getting real experience, certification, college credit, etc. It sucks and it's a grind, but that's basically everything in the world we currently live in.

Your brother is looking to avoid the humiliation that young clueless people experience on the job market - is my guess. He doesn't know his worth and doesn't know his options. I feel like you can prevent this (and good on you for the offer you've given him). I'd pressure him a bit more by warning him of the military's false promises.

Good luck

but I think living somewhere other than our shit hometown would give him a lot of perspective on the world and help him maybe realize that what he actually needs is a community of some kind

There's the key right there. Really push to try living out over where you're at for a year at least before trying for the military. I don't want to sound crass about it but this sounds like a case of dumb-young-guy-itus where you're essentially at a frog sitting at the bottom of a well staring at the sky above wondering if what you know right now is truly all there is to it.

Help him get out of the well and things should straighten out with time

All I will say is this.

Let's ignore for a moment, the policies and morals of imperialism, and just address the situation purely from a self-interested perspective.

The army isn't 'just another job', it is a four year contract, literally signing away 4 years of your life to, for most people, do a dead-end job that you would do in civilian life for significantly less pay, under management structures created by the most authoritarian people in the world, where power and its exercise is literally the only thing that matters.

Want to go to college while in the military? Too bad, only so many can go and you aren't friends with the military administrator who makes that decision (unless he thinks he can hack the marines, they get to do college in the service). The reason for that is that the modern military is very top heavy, and they always need more grunts to do grunt work. If he is lucky he might just get to be a mechanic, where he will still be in a daily battle with administrators to get basic supplies, because of military contractor graft, and still won't be qualified to work on civilian cars when he gets out. But more likely he will essentially be a truck driver/loader, a job that he could do in the U.S. economy for quite a bit of money, CDLs are always in demand. Every path the military for the non-degreed and unconnected is either an exaggeration, or there is a civilian equivalent that isn't that difficult to break into if you have access to a technical college.

Morr than anything, joining the military without a very specific plan and connections is just placing a hold on your life, to be restarted with some horrific stress injury and maybe even some PTSD. It is one of the only options available that pretty much immediately eliminates four years of your life with basically no ability to pivot to something else. It is an arresting of choice, not an expansion of it.

Is university not an option? All the things he is looking for can be found there, there's a decent amount of money to be gotten just for going, and worse case scenario some debt that gets deferred for years isn't the end of the world. If he doesn't have a degree he could make the most of it by starting with community college before transferring to a four year, and if he does he could do graduate school

I'm not a vet, but I've rubbed shoulders with plenty of vets.

1. Every vet I know (10+) suffers from some physical ailment, be it tinnitus (very common), knee problems, back problems, and so. One dude I know is getting colonoscopies in his mid 30s because he slept right next to a giant pit where they burn their trash. And this isn't even considering the PTSD. And the really fucked up thing is that most of the vets weren't even deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. Just being a MP in some random base at Louisiana was enough to give them brutal tinnitus or being a glorified truck driver in Germany was enough to give them knee problems because they jumped off a ledge that was too high that one time.

2. The VA isn't going to do shit. At best, it's a completely underfunded byzantine system where you have jump through Kafkaesque hoops and basically know the right people who know how to game the system in order to actually get them to do what they should be doing. And every vet is going to have some physical ailment from their service (see 1).

3. He will basically have no rights as a soldier. All that shit in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, not that we should seriously consider them, completely goes out the window when you enlist. To give you an example, in courts martial, you're guilty until proven innocent. And this is also not getting into the fact that fragging isn't just done for anti-war reasons. It's very scary to be surrounded by people with guns who all understand that dead men tell no tales.

4. SA is completely rampant and being a dude is not going to save him from being SA by his superiors. And going through the proper channels will not save him from "accidents" (see 3).

I also briefly tried explaining some issues with the US military, but it's a bit hard to undo decades of american "education" in one conversation. He said "my moral code is also not nearly as strong as yours, and I have very little strong feelings toward very much at all outside of just trying to be a good person". I assume he reached out to me because he's having some doubts.

What branch is he thinking about enlisting? Not all branches are equal.

The draw of structure and friendship is a stupidly strong one. It's what made me consider it at 18/19

Thank fuck I didn't.

I recently started working as a mail carrier and it ticks a lot of those same boxes except I'm providing a valuable service to the community instead of doing imperialism. unfortunately it doesn't pay as well as the military, but you can make decent money with good benefits if you stick it out for a while, and it's a union job so it's almost impossible to get fired after probation. plus you're not risking your life so some baby-killing weapons manufacturer CEO can buy another yacht

maybe he could also look into becoming a firefighter? that's a lot harder I'm sure but it's something to be proud of

I need the security and discipline that it will provide

That is not a reason someone comes to on their own.

I've been in this dead end job for about 2 years and my soul is decaying

That is worker alienation

I would consider attacking the source of these ideas. Who or what put that choice of words in his head "I need security and discipline". It sounds like exactly what a recruiter would say.

They're unhappy and alienated, a recruiter has recognised this and told him that the answer to his alienation is finding purpose, then told him that the military is the place to find your purpose in life, your true calling, a cause that matters, yadayadayada. It's strong stuff and it manipulates the minds of the depressed and alienated quite effectively.

EDIT: Interestingly if you plug this question into google you get a 7 year old /r/communism thread

Get him to join the Coast Guard if he really has to be in the military

https://youtu.be/_OPSrNF5cgQ

If he needs discipline, tell him to find a dom. Speaking from experience, the military is nothing but lies and brainwashing.

I know a guy who joined the Army for the same exact reasons. He was lonely, his life was a mess, he hated community college and his job prospects. The Army hooked him in with a pretty sweet compensation package but he's still lonely, still struggling with work/school, and his life is still a mess. When he gets out it will probably still suck because it's a job, not a community.

The military isn't going to give your brother friends, a career, or a partner. The discipline it teaches him will be the same exact discipline his shitty job teaches him now. He might be able to find what he wants in the military but it's going to be easier to find it outside of the military where he won't have to live in barracks and ruin his body and mind for four years.

Basic training is attempted soul-murder. Much worse than a decaying soul in my opinion.

I think that your approach was very intelligent and constructive and he should take your offer, though it sounds like he likely won't.

my moral code is also not nearly as strong as yours, and I have very little strong feelings toward very much at all outside of just trying to be a good person

I think this is only useful if he has a specific type of personality, but have you considered asking him what being a good person even means if it's divorced from morality? That's what being a good person is unless he's on some "master morality" shit where being a good person means being powerful and hot and wealthy, which I don't think is actually what he's thinking of. It sounds to me like he literally just hasn't considered the concept of morality very much and doesn't understand that being a good person doesn't just mean being liked by the people around you.

Have you asked him about becoming a fire fighter or something? Lots of discipline and physical activity and a need for a close relationship with coworkers while being beloved by the local community rather than being hated by it for literally fucking murdering them. He said himself that being in the military requires devotion, and does he really want to seriously devote himself to a cause that he himself cannot defend as being good?

It's probably also worth pointing out that lots of vets get fucked up and then mostly abandoned by the state, with veteran homelessness being a huge problem, along with addiction and suicide because they are left in poverty and misery. If he's really interested in long-term thinking and doesn't believe he's going to quickly become an officer, joining the military is a bad idea even if he doesn't get killed or physically disabled.

This article might wake him up a little maybe.

do you think he has what it takes to get on a B21 Squadron? It would be fantastic if he could get into a B21 cockpit.