Navy says that today's young generation of "coddled, narcissistic praise junkies" are a "somewhat alien life force" and have virtually no interest in signing up. With the situation today, I doubt one has to be any of the above to be strongly deterred from signing up for any armed force unit!

People will defend their career path no matter how bad the choice (the same as we praise the car we just paid a fortune for, even though it is a lemon).
Defence people join for glory reasons and are soon taught that any theatre of conflict (no matter how right or wrong it may be) is what they must fight in.
This reasoning may have worked for WW2 but todays conflicts are grubby affairs that even the WMDeception can't convince the people that they are worth risking their lives for.
They are forced to take the desperate unemployed or the unemployable. Neither group would have their hearts in administering death or being killed, just the financial benefits.