COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
Recruiters struggle to find an Army
Frank Greve, Seattle Times
November 12, 2007
THURMONT, Md. The Army is struggling to find volunteers for anunpopular war, despite recruiting bonuses of up to $20,000 and pay
increases for enlistees that have beaten inflation by 21 percent since 2000.
It met its numeric goal of 80,000 recruits last year, but it paid a
price in terms of declining numbers of high-school graduates and
lower scores on skills and physical tests. The percentage of
minimally qualified Army recruits, known as Category IVs, has
quadrupled since 2002, and the percentage that required special
health or moral waivers has risen sharply as well.
And many recruiting problems preceded the Iraq war.
So what's really making good Army volunteers so hard to come by and,
in a larger sense, sapping America's ability to fight a ground war or
occupy foreign soil?
Pentagon and outside experts cite these factors in order of importance:
• While risks to U.S. troops are far lower than they were in most
previous wars, young adults and their parents find them unacceptably high.
• Parents who went to college want their children to go to college.
So do parents who didn't. As the college-bound percentage of
high-school students has risen to two-thirds, the percentage that
intends to enlist in any branch of the military has fallen by nearly
two-thirds.
• Draft-era veterans, who for generations provided role models for
military service, are dying off. A Pentagon study projects a 14
percent decline in high-quality recruits from a 10 percent drop in
the veteran population.
• Most parents, grandparents, ministers and others whose approval
potential recruits seek don't endorse enlistment these days.
• African Americans, who joined the all-volunteer force in
disproportional numbers for years, have cooled on military service
recently. So have Hispanics.
• Except among those who sign up, duty to country isn't an important
value, according to Defense Department polls.
Army Staff Sgt. Brandon Van Dusen, 26, a low-key Iraq infantry
veteran who recruits in Thurmont, Md., sees all these factors. But
the most powerful one, according to Van Dusen, who describes his
combat stint as "mostly boring," is fear, among recruits and their parents.
"They all figure they're going to get sent to Iraq, be in a firefight
in the first 10 seconds and die," he said.
While it may seem that way, it's not. Deaths among U.S. troops
deployed in Iraq now about 169,000 average 2.3 a day. By
comparison, the daily U.S. toll in World War II was 307.
Put another way, U.S. troops in Iraq die at about three times the
rate of stateside civilians of the same age and sex distribution,
according to a study published in September in Population and
Development Review. Per year deployed, the Iraq death risk for U.S.
troops is about one-fifth that for the Vietnam War, according to
University of Pennsylvania demographer Samuel Preston and co-author
Emily Buzzell.
"People do seem extremely surprised" by the numbers, Preston said,
because they "severely overestimate the death rate in Iraq."
Injury risk overestimated
The same tendency to overestimate risks applies to at least some
Iraq-war injuries.
To gauge it, McClatchy Newspapers recently asked about 20 people to
estimate the number of U.S. troops who had lost limbs in Iraq,
compared with the number who had been killed, which at the time was 3,820.
Guessers included high-school students, counselors, Vietnam veterans,
parents, sociologist Preston and other academics, recruiter Van
Dusen, an Iraq-war correspondent and two editors.
Most estimated the amputee total to be double the death rate or higher.
In fact, the number is 719, according to Chuck Scoville, a program
manager for the military's joint amputation-care system. Add limb
amputations due to accidents, training mistakes, tumors or other
noncombat causes and the total is 795 as of Oct. 20, Scoville said.
That comprises all uniformed personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq since
December 2001.
Preston attributes the exaggerated fear mainly to news-media exposure.
"It's you [journalists] ," he said. "You're always after the dramatic
violence."
Indeed, Pentagon surveys indicate that the more attention high-school
students pay to news, the less likely they are to enlist.
Whatever the reason, senior classes of about 220 at Catoctin High
School in Thurmont turn out only two or three military recruits a
year now, said counselor Curtis Howser. They're of three rare types,
he said: children of families with traditions of military service,
children keen for military discipline and those who enlist on the
spur of the moment.
Nick Jensen Jr., 16, is more typical of the rest of the student body.
"My dad didn't go to college, and he says, 'That's what you're going
to do,' " said Jensen, a junior at Catoctin.
Even when parents do mention the military, Howser said, "it's only as
a means to an end, which is money for college."
Different views of duty
Absent from most conversations about students' futures is any notion
of duty to country, said Howser, 57, who's been counseling for a
quarter-century. "It's just never there when you talk about college," he said.
On the other hand, duty to country is now the reason that recruits
most often cite for enlisting, according to Curtis Gilroy, director
of the Defense Department's Office of Accession Policy, which
oversees the armed services' recruiting. Money for college and
training for a career, which used to top duty to country, rank behind it.
Broad opposition to the Iraq war is a major factor in the Army's
recruiting difficulties, according to Gilroy. That's especially true
among African Americans, he said, whose opposition was earliest and
greatest. The reasons behind a recent decline in Hispanic
participation are less clear.
But the effects are demonstrable and dramatic.
"Does the current situation with the war on terrorism make you more
likely or less likely to join the military?" a Pentagon-sponsored
poll asked high schoolers in November 2002, before the invasion of
Iraq. Half said less likely, 37 percent said more likely.
When the same question was asked last June, 69 percent said less
likely and 17 percent said more likely.
Absent reasons to support war, the public's backing for conflicts
generally declines as fatalities mount, according to John Mueller, an
Ohio State University political scientist and the author of the book
"War, Presidents and Public Opinion."
He sees that trend in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars. The main
difference among them, he added, is that support fell faster in more
recent conflicts. By his calculation, it took 20,000 U.S. deaths
before public support for the Vietnam War fell below 50 percent in
opinion polls. That happened after 1,500 U.S. troop deaths in Iraq.
Whether that's good news or bad depends on how you read it. A nation
that's reluctant to fight is a humbler one, in Mueller's view, one
more likely to work with allies and less likely to go to war
pre-emptively. On the other hand, it's a more vulnerable nation when
it's up against foes who are less afraid.
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