Rumsfeld responds . . .

Well no surprises here, Rumsfeld disagrees with the conclusions in the Pentagon report I discussed in the prior post. He claims we can just shuffle folks around and solve any shortfall problems. Uh huh.

article from CNN.com


It's interesting actually, this AP article has much more detail from the Pentagon report, including info about divorce rates among troops (rising), attrition at the officer level (rising), and reserve troop levels (falling).

This is not good folks. Sooner or later Rummy's shuffling will have run its course and we'll need to reinstate the draft. This paragraph paints a pretty alarming picture, no?:

"The Army fell short of its recruiting goals in 2005 despite boosting recruiting efforts, doubling enlistment bonuses, increasing the top age for recruits and accepting a higher number of college dropouts."

The "thin green line" gets thinner - guess what comes next??

Oh man, check out this AP story:

article on Yahoo News

Here are some choice tidbits:

"Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a "thin green line" that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon. . .

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

As evidence, Krepinevich points to the Army's 2005 recruiting slump — missing its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 — and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives.

He wrote that the Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of war "or risk `breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment."

_______

OK everyone - the writing is on the wall. Don't say I didn't warn you. Get ready to go fight for your country.

Now we're resorting to buying people into service!

And that's not all. I had to read this article twice to make sure I wasn't dreaming. But yes, it's true - army recruits will now get larger signing bonuses than Wall Street analysts coming out of college! Why? Because the Army has no choice. After missing their recruiting targets (again) they're taking another tactic: competitive pay. They're also dramatically raising the maximum age for new recruits from 35 to 42. 42?!? I know some 42 year olds. Not sure I want them on the front line.

article from Sign On San Diego


"After falling well short of its recruiting goals last year, the Army has set even higher monthly targets for this summer, hoping that new financial incentives will attract high school and college graduates in the face of mounting deaths in Iraq. . . A new law will allow the Army to give larger financial bonuses for enlistments and re-enlistments – doubling the maximum payment to new active duty recruits from $20,000 to $40,000, and from $10,000 to $20,000 for reservists. It also will let older recruits sign on by raising the top age from 35 to 42. And the top re-enlistment bonus for active duty soldiers would increase from $60,000 to $90,000."

Oh man. Well now we've seen it all - dumb people (see the prior post), old people, and "bribes" to fill the ranks. What's next? Uh....

Oh my . . .

Check out this story in Slate about the Army having to basically recruit dummies to fill the ranks:

article from Slate

Here's some salient info:
"...Faced with repeated failures to meet its recruitment targets, the Army has had to lower its standards dramatically. First it relaxed restrictions against high-school drop-outs. Then it started letting in more applicants who score in the lowest third on the armed forces aptitude test—a group, known as Category IV recruits, who have been kept to exceedingly small numbers, as a matter of firm policy, for the past 20 years. (There is also a Category V—those who score in the lowest 10^th percentile. They have always been ineligible for service in the armed forces and, presumably, always will be.)
...
Then again, viewed from another angle, this would double the Army's least desirable soldiers. These are the soldiers that the Army has long shut out of its ranks; that it is now recruiting avidly, out of sheer desperation; and that—according to the military's own studies—seriously degrade the competence of every unit they end up joining. No, things haven't gone to hell in a handbasket, but they're headed in that direction. Every Army officer knows this. And that's why many of them want the United States to get out of Iraq."

I'm telling you guys - once all the dummies have been recruited, they're coming after the rest of us in a draft - they'll have no choice. . .