“We're having problems recruiting for a very simple reason: people that have been through this over the last 20-30 years have said, ‘What are we doing? What's the point of being in the military?’ We go to these places. They look around in Iraq or they look around in Afghanistan and they say, ‘There's nothing here. What am I doing here?’ Oh, well, you're building democracy. And people burst out laughing. It's nonsense,” MacGregor said in the interview, released Monday.
People in the US are ready to defend the county but do not see evidence of the US government doing that with the military, MacGregor said. Defending countries in the Middle East or Ukraine is not what soldiers sign up for, MacGregor said.
Military institutions take decades to build and are resilient because of replenishments in human capital, MacGregor said. Destroying the military establishment sets the conditions for the “total destruction” of the country, MacGregor said.