The Pentagon is desperately trying to stop the hemorrhaging. The army lowered its academic standards last fall, and, just last month, the Wall Street Journal wrote that “To keep more soldiers in the service, the Army has told battalion commanders, who typically command 800-soldier units, that they can no longer bounce soldiers from the service for poor fitness, pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse or generally unsatisfactory performance.”
Just what we need: an army of Federlines.
The military’s recruiting problems shouldn’t come as a surprise. The mayhem in Iraq continues to grow while Afghanistan is playing catch-up, fast. According to the nonpartisan factcheck.org, “By most measures the violence [in Iraq] is getting worse. Both April and May were record months in Iraq for car bombings…with more than 135 of them being set off each month.” In Afghanistan, the Taliban-orchestrated violence has gotten so bad that it has left “much of Afghanistan off-limits to aid workers and has reinforced concerns that the war here is escalating into a conflict on the scale of that in Iraq,” according to the Associated Press. Potential recruits may be young, but they’re not stupid.
Adding to the crisis, there are rumblings that more U.S. troops are needed. Democratic senator Joe Biden recently returned from Iraq, where, he says, American generals told him they need more troops. Republican senator John McCain agrees. But where will we get more troops when recruitment is down, our current supply of soldiers is getting killed or wounded, and Donald Rumsfeld now admits that we could be in Iraq for 10 to 15 years?
Does anybody else feel a draft coming on?
He is exactly right. Now we have the Pentagon talking about taking us away from our two war rediness doctrine. If the times are as dangerous as we keep being told, is that really what we want to do?
Read the full text of John's piece here.
-The Oklahoma Hippy
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