"It's broken, Jim."
For the first time since 2001, the Army began the fiscal year in October with only 18.4 percent of the year's target of 80,000 active-duty recruits already in the pipeline. That amounts to less than half of last year's figure and falls well below the Army's goal of 25 percent.
We all knew it was coming (and by we, I mean those of us who aren't Bushworshipping Morons). The current US military is buckling under the strain of being used for purposes it was NOT designed for. Clinton's military was built for quick operations, not the bogged down quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. We had the firepower to blow up both countries, but we lacked the MANPOWER to actually hold on to them after that.
And so how is the Army addressing this problem? With the same shortsightedness that led Bush into his "War on Tarror".
Continued on the flip.
Meanwhile, the Army is rushing incoming recruits into training as quickly as it can. Compared with last year, it has cut by 50 percent the average number of days between the time a recruit signs up and enters boot camp. It is adding more than 800 active-duty recruiters to the 5,201 who were on the job last year, as attracting each enlistee requires more effort and monetary incentives.
In short, in order to meet the demands of quantity demanded by the current pace of operations, they're risking falling short on QUALITY. Which means more rapists, murderers and other riffraff who give the armed forces a bad name are more likely to slip through the cracks of a system DESPERATE to find the warm bodies it needs.
Not to mention, the incentive to quietly "hush up" criminal activities by those same people in order to keep them in uniform.
Yet Army officials see worrisome signs that young American men and women -- and their parents -- are growing wary of military service, largely because of the Iraq conflict.
"Very frankly, in a couple of places our recruiting pool is getting soft," said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief. "We're hearing things like, 'Well, let's wait and see how this thing settles out in Iraq,' " he said in an interview. "For the active duty for '05 it's going to be tough to meet our goal, but I think we can. I think the telling year for us is going to be '06."
Other senior military officers have voiced similar concerns in recent days. "I anticipate that fiscal year '05 will be very challenging for both active and reserve component recruiting," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a House Appropriations subcommittee Feb. 17. The Marine Corps fell short of its monthly recruiting quota in January for the first time in nearly a decade.
2006? Try 2007, 2008, 2009....the longer we stay in Iraq and the more casualties pile up, the worse the numbers will get. And the lower the military will have to set the bar for the people it is willing to accept.
Because the Army is the main U.S. military ground force, its ability to draw recruits is critical to the nation's preparedness to fight current and future wars. The Army can sustain its ranks through retaining more experienced soldiers -- and indeed retention in 2004 was 107 percent -- but if too few young recruits sign up, the force will begin to age. Moreover, higher retention in the active-duty Army translates into a dwindling stream of recruits for the already troubled Army Guard and Reserve.
Welcome to Catch 22. Yes, you can employ tricks like stop-loss to make the numbers LOOK good for the short term, but all you do is piss off the soldiers held back and ensure LARGER mass retirements/resignations a little later. And as a unintended side effect, that behavior makes recruitment HARDER because people don't want to sign up for a 4 year hitch only to find out that they're actually being stuck for 6 years or more.
"If you cut down 300,000 trees, you can do that pretty quick, but now grow 30,000 of them back," Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, told a House Armed Services committee hearing Feb. 9. "It takes time, as you know, to grow the quality soldier."
Time, however, is what the Army lacks.
It takes months of expensive training to get a deployable soldier. It takes 1 second and $5 of military surplus in Iraq to kill or maim them.
Beyond replacing normal turnover each year, officials say the Army must accelerate recruitment to meet an aggressive timeline for filling out the new brigades of 3,500 to 4,000 soldiers each, as well as to expand and reorganize the 33 existing brigades.
In other words, fill the holes left by the dead and crippled from the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. Over 15,000 individuals simply to REPLACE those lost.
'Such demands have led the Army to deplete its reservoir of enlistees in the Delayed Entry Program (DEP). The DEP consists of people who have signed enlistment contracts but opt to delay their entry to training camps for up to a year. DEP numbers fell from 33,249 at the beginning of fiscal 2004 to 14,739 at the start of this fiscal year, according to U.S. Army Recruiting Command statistics.'
They're tapping every resource they've got, and it still isn't enough. And Bush still expects to present a credible military threat to North Korea or Iran? As for China? Might as well write off Taiwan at this rate.