The Barbaric Lowering of Recruitment Standards
By Anthony Gregory • Friday May 9, 2008 11:18 AM PDT • 22 Comments
Notoriously, the Iraq war has required far more troops than the administration expected. Back when the war planners were selling the operation as a “cakewalk,” part of the unrealistic plan was that only 100,000 or so troops would be needed to pacify and bring freedom to the country—when, weeks before Shock and Awe, Army General Eric K. Shinsek put the number at “several hundred thousand,” the Pentagon claimed he “misspoke” and Paul Wolfowitz reasserted the naive, lower figure.
Furthermore, this war has gone on considerably longer than many hawks expected, or claimed to expect. America has been occupying Iraq for more than five years since “Mission Accomplished,” and during this time nearly 4,000 members of the US Armed Forces have died trying to wrap up this cakewalk.
Overall, the government has sent 1.6 million troops into combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. All this strain for enough fresh bodies, exacerbated by the waning willingness among those who have historically been willing to enlist and the worst failures in reaching projected recruitment targets since the 1970s, has forced the military to steadily lower its recruitment standards and otherwise cut corners in order to sustain operations abroad. They’ve resorted to severe uses of stop-loss orders, which constitute a form of extended involuntary indentured servitude for the military. They’ve lessened up on the academic prerequisites—which helped for a while. They’ve begun signing up illegal aliens, offering them citizenship if they join and even going so low as to mislead them with false promises of citizenship for their families. They’ve waived rules against recruiting felons for tens of thousands of convicts, and more every year, including some implicated in sexual assault and terrorist threats. They’ve used No Child Left Behind to blackmail recalcitrant high schools into handing over the names of their students to recruitment officials. (Even their standards and training for recruiting recruiters have been questionable, seeing as how these people have been caught encouraging teenagers to fake high-school diplomas to qualify for enlistment, and, in a startling number of cases, have been accused of raping would-be enlistees: in one year alone, 80 recruiters were disciplined for sexual misconduct, including the raping of teenage girls “on recruiting office couches.” Other victims were “assaulted in government cars and groped en route to entrance exams.”) Such depredations on the part of recruiters, as well as just their more mundane but nevertheless disturbing, federally-imposed presence, have understandably caused controversies in both higher and lower education, and in some communities.
With this unpopular war dragging with no end in sight, with an increasingly invasive recruitment apparatus, with a strain on troops that has translated into all sorts of misconduct and poor morale generally, it is no surprise they have to keep lowering their standards, stooping to ever lower lows, to maintain a military hold on Iraq. And yet I am still surprised by this: Now they’re deploying 43,000 troops who, for medical reasons, have been deemed “undeployable” and unfit for combat. The empire has reached another depth of barbarism. Perhaps soon getting wounded will no longer be a way out of the line of fire.
Tags: Iraq, Middle East, Personal Liberty, War 
You forgot to mention that despite all of this ,they still aren’t budging on “don’t ask don’t tell.”
Jaap | May 9, 2008 | Reply
Forget about “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” It’s a trivial issue. Instead, we should be asking why we’ve been in Japan and Western Europe since 1945. How long is long enough? How about claiming mission accomplished and coming home after six decades?
If the preposterously named “war on terror” was a legitimate war worth winning, we’d be pulling troops out of these other regions that are protecting us from non-existent enemies, and we’d put them in the war zone that threatens our safety.
The truth is that the our worst enemy is our own government. Unlike a biological parasite that understands that it will die if it kills its host, our government is comprised of power-hungry idiots. They’re too stupid to stop short of killing the host: us. They are quite willing to march all of us off the cliff in their silly quest to rid us of some pissed off Muslims on the other side of the world. And if it means recruiting criminals and foreigners to act as cannon fodder to further the insanity (paid for by mortgaging our future), so be it.
Steve Hogan | May 9, 2008 | Reply
To whose profit is this war? (Most war). People are making huge profits at the expense of the US taxpayer and young dupes who go into the service. How effective in brainwashing the public schools have been. (Yet many homeschoolers are duped, too, and we know several who are signing up with the Marines, including one lovely (for now) 18 year old.) Very sad.
Eliza | May 10, 2008 | Reply
My cousin is one of the dupes. He’s a young man in his early 20′s. The guy is rudderless and looking for meaning in life. He signed up for the Marine Corps last month, despite what is going on in the Middle East. Stupid? No doubt. But he’s a product of our public schools. He has no critical thinking skills and knows nothing about the world.
His education is about to begin. They’ll shave his head and wring every last ounce of individuality and humanity out of his being. Our “leaders” will ship him off to “protect” us from the terrorists. If he survives the meat grinder, he’ll probably come home as a psychological shell of his former self.
The state is evil. My cousin will learn that lesson the hard way. I fear for my country. What have we become?
Steve Hogan | May 10, 2008 | Reply
Steve,
Could you elaborate on why you think that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a trivial issue? I tend to think that there is a lot to be said for government not meddling directly in private labor relations, but that at the same time it should set a good example in the way it runs its own organizations, of which the military happens to be a particularly large one. The fact that it also happens to be a particularly controversial one does not matter. You can doubt, and I would sympathize if you did, whether the Korean war was a great idea, but does that imply that segregation in the army during that war was a “trivial” issue?
Jaap | May 11, 2008 | Reply
I think all people, regardless of sexuality, have the same right to get a job for the government military. But does anyone have a right to a government job? And, while I believe many homosexuals and women are perfectly able to engage in combat and defend their country, government combat very seldom actually protects the country. On the contrary, the US military is most often an agency of aggression. Why expand its labor pool?
Anthony Gregory | May 11, 2008 | Reply
Jaap,
As Anthony correctly observes, our foreign policy is in shambles. The blunt instrument of that policy is our military. Instead of being used as a deterrent against imminent invasion from a foreign power, as our founders intended it to be, it is stirring up hornet nests across the globe.
In addition to making us less safe, that policy is exorbitantly expensive. Our political leadership is running us off a cliff financially. If foreign lenders suddenly decide to dump their dollars, our country will be facing a calamitous depression or hyperinflation.
Third, the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq have severely stretched our military. The troops are tired, the equipment is worn out, and morale is in the toilet.
Given that, I’d say discrimination against homosexuals in military recruitment is not exactly the top priority right now. End the wars, bring the troops home from everywhere, and get ourselves on firm financial footing. Then let’s address the lesser issue of don’t ask, don’t tell.
Steve Hogan | May 11, 2008 | Reply
Another reason the draft should never have been abolished. If there were a draft, and ALL citizens were to consider the possibility of going to war, then maybe reasons for going to war would be considered more judiciously!
ansel bolton | May 12, 2008 | Reply
Ansel,
That wasn’t the case in World War 1 or 2. The draft was in effect and there was relatively little resistance. Given generation Y’s more appreciative view of big government (according to Pew Research – I’d have to look it up again), this would not necessarily mean a return to 60s style revolt.
Dain | May 12, 2008 | Reply
Ansel, all citizens are never equally affected by the draft. It is always unfairly levied upon the young, for one thing. It is a great moral crime, too, and is in fact a form of slavery. Furthermore, even in Vietnam, the draft might have helped end the war, but it also helped expand the war. With a TOTALLY voluntary military, where soldiers are free to quit at any time (as should be the right of anyone held to a labor contract — damages are perhaps appropriate, but never compelled service), the empire would have much harder time waging large, aggressive wars. Make funding voluntary, and the wars will be even less common and less widely waged.
Anthony Gregory | May 12, 2008 | Reply