“Army Strong” — Or Not

“Army Strong” may not be the most accurate slogan for an institution that now recruits high school dropouts and people with criminal records and histories of drug abuse or mental health problems. But even lowering mental and physical fitness standards is not enough to get the warm bodies for Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the Army is planning to spend $15 billion on a pull-out-all-the-stops package of sign-up incentives [h/t Cursor]:

To relieve the wartime strain on ground troops and meet a mandate to expand the force, the Army plans to offer a series of new and costly incentives, including a home mortgage fund and a military prep school for high school dropouts, to help draw in a shrinking pool of eligible volunteers, according to military officials and federal budget documents.

After lowering its own education standards and accepting a rising number of recruits who would have been considered unfit a few years ago, the Army’s initiatives – costing a large part of the $15 billion it will receive to add more soldiers – underscore the difficulty it faces in signing up enough young men and women to add 65,000 soldiers to its ranks over the next three years.
[…]
“Some of these [new recruiting efforts] are unprecedented, ” said David Johnson, a senior political scientist at the government-funded Rand Corporation who specializes in national security affairs. “They have to get people to join in a very tough market. Everybody knows part of the contract [for enlisting] in the ground forces is you are going to go to Iraq and Afghanistan at least once.”

Army Strong?

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of Army recruits with a high school diploma has plunged from 94 percent to 71 percent. The percentage requiring so-called “moral” waivers for past criminal behavior or drug abuse and others waivers for medical conditions has nearly tripled since 2003, to 12 percent.

In March 2004, James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote a piece called “The Hollow Army.” Although it reads dated in some ways (Donald Rumsfeld is no longer Secretary of Defense, for one), the heart of it is as relevant as ever — more so in many ways:

Obviously, everything changed after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a slight exaggeration to say that the entire U.S. military is either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go. But only slight.

The basic problem is that an ever leaner, numerically smaller military is being asked to patrol an ever larger part of the world.

“Unanticipated U.S. ground force requirements in postwar Iraq,” a report for the Army War College noted late last year, “have stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point,” with more than a third of the Army’s total “end strength” committed in and around Iraq. “Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath argue strongly,” the report said, “for an across-the-board reassessment”—that is, for an increase of U.S. force levels.

Meanwhile, barely noticed, the United States still has some 75,000 soldiers in Germany, 41,000 in Japan, 41,000 in Korea, 13,000 in Italy, 12,000 in the United Kingdom, and so on, down through a list of more than a hundred countries—plus some 26,000 sailors and Marines deployed afloat. The new jobs keep coming, and the old ones don’t go away. Several times I have heard officers on Army bases refer mordantly to the current recruiting slogan: “An Army of One.” The usual punch line is, “That’s how many soldiers are left for new assignments now.”

Unfortunately, that reality is the same, even though the slogan has changed:

Three things are wrong with the current situation. The most immediate and obvious is what it does to the troops. …
[…]
An overworked military can function very well for a while, as ours has—but not indefinitely if it relies on volunteers. “We are in serious danger of breaking the human-capital equation of the Army,” Thomas White, a retired general and a former Secretary of the Army, told me last year. “Once you break it, it takes a long time to put it back together. It took us over twenty years after Vietnam.”

The second problem is that America has so many troops tied down in so many places that, for all its power, it is strangely hamstrung. Despite our level of spending and our apparent status as the world’s mono-power, the United States has few unused reserves of military strength. …
[…]
The third problem involves national strategy. Our stated ambitions are wholly out of sync with the resources America can bring to bear. Even now, despite solemn promises, we do not have enough soldiers to occupy and democratize Iraq while also fulfilling previous commitments in many other places around the globe. Soon even fewer U.S. troops will be available to enter any other necessary engagement.

I recommend reading the entire piece. It isn’t long. More important than the length, though, is that it is still all too relevant.

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