Today is Armed Forces Day, an occasion to express gratitude and respect for those men and women making the sacrifice to serve our country in uniform. This year, I can think of no better way to honor their commitment to duty than to give those reentering civilian life a shot at gainful employment.

Few people truly understand how hard it is to transition out of the military. In uniform, your mission is clear. Your role is defined. You live with structure, purpose, and a sense of belonging. But when service ends, the system that trained you offers little preparation for what comes next.

Sadly, this transition is often treated like a final administrative task rather than the critical life shift it truly is. You get a checklist, a few briefings, and a polite nod toward civilian life. But those things do not prepare you for the deeper shift — how to rebuild your purpose, your identity, and your worth in a world that operates differently.

When the structure and rhythm of military life disappear, veterans are suddenly confronted with a vacuum. The transition programs that are supposed to help prove unproductive because they are still led by people who don’t understand what it takes to succeed after service.

Our servicemen and women get stuck with outdated processes that are heavy on structure and light on relevance, leaving them unprepared for today’s fast-moving economy. If we continue with this approach,  we will keep losing people after the fight is over.

And it isn’t just veterans who are suffering. The economy is feeling the strain as well.

Industries from tech to logistics to healthcare are scrambling to find people who can build teams, make decisions, and lead under pressure. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to find qualified candidates, only to be disappointed because they don’t have the grit and follow-through to overcome the challenges faced by today’s organizations.

Hiring managers complain that new workers are entitled, lazy, and don’t take initiative. They say they’re tired of seeing the same resumes and hiring employees who don’t move the needle. But they overlook the group that can address these problems and more: veterans.

Veterans have developed leadership skills, adaptability, and mission-driven focus through years of training and real-world experience. Simply by enlisting, they demonstrated that they are willing to work for something bigger than themselves and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve it.

I have seen how the military trains men and women to lead, build teams, persevere, and thrive under pressure — traits companies claim to need. Yet too often, there is a disconnect. Too often, veterans are overlooked because they do not have the “experience” or necessary qualifications.

These things are undoubtedly important, but should not be the only consideration. When they are, two catastrophic things happen: companies miss out on thousands of uniquely qualified candidates, and veterans are left to suffer.

What could be a wonderful partnership becomes another statistic of veteran unemployment and corporate leadership struggles.

It’s not that veterans are not capable or that companies don’t care. The system was simply not built to align the two sides properly.

But that just isn’t good enough for our economy — or our veterans.

We need a new way forward, one that recognizes the immense, ever-changing challenges today’s organizations face while simultaneously valuing the skills veterans have developed through their service — even if they don’t show up on the job experience section in a resume.

It’s time for companies to consider veterans’ unique skills and experiences. They might be exactly what the economy needs because, right now, America isn’t short on workers — it’s short on leaders.

Translating that experience into civilian terms is not simple. But it is possible.

For me, education was part of that process. I chose to study at Pepperdine University, where I was challenged to think differently, expand my leadership skills beyond the military, and see the civilian world not as foreign ground but as a new mission to master.

These years reminded me that growth does not stop when the uniform comes off. It simply changes form, morphing into another kind of challenge. And it’s one I believe veterans are perfectly suited to meet.

The solution, however,  isn’t more hiring initiatives, which soon become quotas and occasions for empty virtue signaling. Instead, we need deliberate pathways that match veterans’ capabilities and values with organizations willing to put leadership potential to work.

It is not about charity. It’s about putting proven leadership where it belongs — in the fight, making an impact. This can and does lead to real careers, authentic leadership, and incredible results.

If you are serious about building a team that can survive and thrive in the real world, stop overlooking veterans. We don’t need favors. We need opportunities. And the world needs what we have to offer. So this Armed Forces Day, America’s companies can show their gratitude by trusting those who have already proven they can lead.

Kenny Spratt is the founder and CEO of TalentBase, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business specializing in connecting highly-skilled veterans to meaningful career opportunities across the private sector.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Ten prisoners, including four charged with murder, escaped from the New Orleans jail on Friday after the city elected as sheriff a progressive activist who had never worn a badge.

Orleans Parish became a trial run in a plan by left-wing billionaires to extend George Soros’ campaign of installing anti-police prosecutors even further, into electing anti-law-and-order sheriffs. Susan Hutson was elected in December 2021, with New Orleans Public Radio saying at the time that “a Susan Hutson win could give New Orleans — and the U.S. — its 1st progressive sheriff.”

Hutson had never served as a law enforcement officer, but rather worked as an “independent police monitor” who criticized police, New Orleans Public Radio said. The outlet stated she would “reform the criminal justice system with a left-wing ideology.” The primary role of the sheriff in Orleans Parish is to run the jail.

Hutson squeaked into office after the incumbent, another black Democrat, got 48% in the primary compared to her 35%, which led to a runoff since the incumbent did not get 50%. In the runoff, the dynamic flipped with the assistance of big-money out-of-state groups, including PAC for Justice, which wants to divert the jail budget to “social programs.”

During the initial election, Hutson “struggled to pull in money, only taking in $131,000 from donors, but during the runoff, PAC for Justice received a $200,000 donation from a national group named FWD.us, which has also donated funds to end non-unanimous jury trials,” New Orleans Public Radio said. FWD.us was co-founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. PAC for Justice’s other donors, almost all out-of-state, also included groups that were, in turn, funded by Soros.

“Hutson said if elected, she would also support promoting women to deputies to diversify the workplace, helping to buck the national trend of the white male sheriff,” the outlet added.

Sean Kennedy of Virginians for Safe Communities, which opposes lenient prosecutors, told The Daily Wire that Hutson “was an anti-police activist lawyer who never wore a badge but won anyway with $160,000 from Soros PACs and another $200,000 from Mark Zuckerberg — neither of which (last time I checked) are from New Orleans.”

“George Soros and his allies have expanded their attempted takeover of the criminal justice system. On top of the $50 million Soros spent on prosecutors, he is now spending millions more to buy local sheriff races and install radical incompetents like he did in New Orleans, Phoenix, and on Cape Cod,” he added.

Hutson lashed out on Friday about how having four accused murderers on the loose would affect her own election.

“Why did it happen just right now, right in the middle, as we’re getting ready to start this sheriff’s race?” she said at a press conference on the escape, according to ABC News. “This is very suspicious. We know that they had help. We’re showing you they had help. This was coordinated. There’s much more than meets the eye.”

The remark suggested that she believes that rather than the escape happening due to her incompetence, it was orchestrated by jail guards who wanted to see her replaced as sheriff.

The Soros takeover of the legal system is one of the most remarkable political phenomena of the last decade. The billionaire financier, an expert in arbitrage, discovered that rather than influencing state legislators to change laws, it is cheaper and easier to elect prosecutors who will simply nullify laws they don’t like by refusing to prosecute them.

Mainstream Democrat and Republican prosecutors believe it is a violation of the separation of the branches of government to ignore laws. But Soros also discovered that by targeting cities where residents “vote blue no matter who,” it is possible to replace Democrat incumbents with leftists who don’t share those ethical concerns by injecting unheard-of amounts of cash into primary elections, which were historically cheap, low-turnout affairs.

Instead of donating to a candidate’s campaign, the Soros machine essentially runs it for the candidate, through “independent expenditures” such as ads and mailers that it designs, pays for, and runs on its own.

Putting national cash into local races for sheriff represents a significant advancement of the project, one that would place anti-police activists in charge of a region’s public safety.

Ten inmates left the jail through a hole behind a toilet at 1:01 a.m., while only one employee—a civilian rather than law enforcement—was assigned to watch their pod, and while that person left to get food, officials said. At 8:30 a.m., they were discovered missing.

“These folks that were able to get out did so because of defective locks on the cells,” Hutson said, while also saying, “We have the indication that these detainees received assistance in their escape from inside our department.”