Everybody knows the military has been having trouble hitting its recruitment numbers, and Republicans have been banging the drums about COVID vaccine mandates and the sudden swing to woke in the military.

Nope, says the AP and the current military brass. It’s that there is a sudden outbreak of scaredy-cat 18-year-olds.

While some Republicans blame the COVID-19 vaccine or “wokeness” for the Army’s recruiting woes, the military service says the bigger hurdles are more traditional ones: Young people don’t want to die or get injured, deal with the stress of Army life and put their lives on hold.

They “just don’t see the Army as something that’s relevant,” said Maj. Gen. Alex Fink, head of Army marketing. “They see us as revered, but not relevant, in their lives.”

Addressing those longtime issues has taken on greater urgency as the Army tries to recover from its worst recruiting year in decades, a situation aggravated by the tight jobs market. The Army is offering new programs, advertising and enticements in an effort to change perceptions and reverse the decline.

This is, in my humble opinion, some Grade-A BS.

Sure, we have all seen how Gen Z has, on the whole, been filled with a bunch of whiny little bi-atches. But a substantial fraction of our impressions of Gen Z come from the extreme online life of the generation; even given its large number of soy-boys and alphabet-obsessed kids, there are plenty of normal kids. We just don’t see them because we get overwhelmed by the sheer number of idiots.

Nobody tweets around TikToks of normal kids being normal. There are still plenty of them in the recruiting pool.

And let’s face it, the military has never been a safe occupation, but it is actually not particularly unsafe these days. Combat deaths at the height of the war on terror were terrible but hardly numerous by any historical standards. During the 1980s the death rate, mostly by training accidents, exceeded that of the war on terror years. Even during the war on terror itself, training accidents were more numerous than combat deaths.

Fink, the Army’s marketing head, said the top three reasons young people cite for rejecting military enlistment are the same across all the services: fear of death, worries about post-traumatic stress disorder and leaving friends and family — in that order. He said the Army wanted a better understanding of any additional barriers to service, beyond those top three.

By a “significant margin,” he said, the most common response beyond Nos. 1-3 was, “I will be putting my life on hold.” That was cited by more than 1 in 5 people surveyed.