2018 is the first time any military branch would miss its recruitment goals since 2005. That problem has now spread across all branches of the military, where missing recruitment goals has become the norm. People simply don't want to enlist, for reasons one can only imagine... We're now getting things like congressional hearings on why the military is repeatedly failing to hit its recruitment goals [1]. This is also the setting where the military has been trying a variety of different efforts to get people interested.

And it's in this exact context that the Pentagon started to release UFO videos and the military was publicly patenting sci-fi level technology like a "craft using an inertial mass reduction device." [2] Not only does the patent read like it was written by a sci-fi jargon-generator LLM, but there's absolutely no point to it. Were something like this real, you would keep it beyond classified to not only maximize your national benefit from it, but to try to keep it out of the hands of peer nations for as long as possible. With it published, if e.g. China or Russia was going to make this, what now? Are you going to sue them? Maybe get the WTO to give them a stern talking to. Its one and only purpose is to publicize "secret" research from the military.

So why? Literally the only explanation I can see is it just being another ham-fisted recruitment effort. 'You can go make a living making software pushing ads on people who don't want them, or you can enlist in the military, travel the world, and perhaps even one day get clearance to see and start working where the "real" science is happening.'

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[1] - https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/to-receive-te...

[2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en?inventor=S...