This is more Baltar's area than mine, but I've got to say that I hope our military and foreign policy planners are taking into account the constraints of numbers like these as they weigh future strategic plans.
The U.S. Army missed its April recruiting goal by a whopping 42 percent and the Army Reserve fell short by 37 percent, officials said on Tuesday, showing the depth of the military's wartime recruiting woes ... The Army National Guard said it did not yet have its April numbers, but has missed its recruiting goal in every month of the current fiscal year through March and was 23 percent behind its year-to-date goal at that time. It missed its fiscal 2004 annual goal.
Our leaders can make all kinds of whiz-bang plans - but if the American people don't want to serve in the military that's necessary to carry them out ... well, let's hope someone is making sure that people in DC are keeping in mind what is possible, and what's not possible, as long as we have a volunteer military.
Of course the failure to meet recruiting goals is only part of the problem lately. An article in Tuesday's New York Times lays out the incredibly risky tactics that recruiters are resorting to to get the new recruits they can land. Just out of a psychiatric ward? Apparently that's not a problem. Of course lowering standards to the degree they have been lowered has all kinds of effects in terms of the quality and reliability of the military. And as the story notes, as some of these people move up the ranks ... we could see more problems in the future stemming from this slide in standards.
Will these recruitment problems lead to a rethinking of Don't Ask, Don't Tell? I doubt it. But it would appear that something needs to be done.
Posted by armand at May 5, 2005 12:33 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics