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Uncle Sam Wants Addicts, Misfits
Somehow, Military’s Recruitment Goals Will Be Met
By Mike Blair
The U.S. military is headed for drastic drops in the quality of its troops and morale if current trends continue. Due to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
the recruitment of young men and women for the military has dropped considerably, and recruiting officers are finding it more and more difficult to meet their quotas.
This has resulted in the recruiters relaxing—even falsifying—the requirements that should be met for enlistment in the military services.
This is just another indicator that ultimately the Pentagon will have to turn to a draft to fill its dwindling ranks. Local draft boards are currently being staffed to undertake drafting American youth for the military, despite claims by President George W. Bush and leaders of Congress that they have no plans for conscription to maintain military manpower.
According to reports that are beginning to appear in the establishment media, recruiters are bending or breaking rules to meet quotas.
A northern Ohio recruiter, as an example, has reported that he has been hiding police records and medical histories of potential recruits—deceptions, he says, that are condoned, even encouraged, by his superiors.
Several recruiters have admitted they have concealed mental health histories and police records of those they have recruited, and have even falsified documents, including high school diplomas. They have been providing potential recruits “cheat sheets,” wallet-sized cards that are slipped to the applicants before they take the military’s aptitude tests.
The breakdown in the recruiting system has even drawn the attention of the mainstream news, which as recently as May reported that a high school student near Denver revealed that two recruiters had advised him how to cheat.
The student, identified as David McSwane, indicated that one recruiter told him how to create a “high school diploma” from a nonexistent school, while the other helped him obtain a product that would cleanse traces of an illegal psychedelic drug from his bloodstream.
The Army’s own admission indicates that there were 320 unsubstantiated cases of recruitment improprieties in 2004, up from 199 in 1999.
Recruiters have also been reportedly lying to applicants by making false promises that if they join up they will not be sent to Iraq.
In 2004, there were 1,118 cases of recruiter wrongdoing, which amounts to about one in five recruiters. Some senior Army officers have said that for at least every improper recruiting act discovered there are at least two more that are never discovered.
The seriousness of the recruiting scandal is illustrated by a 21-year-old Ohio applicant who was signed up by the Army just a week after he was released from a psychiatric ward.
“The fact that they would recruit someone straight out of a psychiatric hospital . . . is beyond my comprehension and appalling,” the young man’s father said.
One recruiter reported that one in three young men he signed up had a problem that “needed concealing.”
“The only people who want to join the Army now have issues,” he concluded. “They’re troubled with health, police or drug problems.”
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