COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch
UNFIT FOR DUTY
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Dara Purvis, RAW STORY COLUMNIST
2006
A few weeks ago, President Bush delivered the commencement address at the graduation of the Naval Academy. Among the usual generalities that you hear at every graduation, he talked about the “transformation” of the military, and bragged about the money that his administration has funneled into military technology.As a few political commentators remarked, this seems a bit bizarre, considering the crisis of military personnel—after all, what should we care if there are super-duper snazzy guns for soldiers to use if there aren’t enough soldiers to use them?
Perhaps more worryingly, at the same time that Bush’s policies are stretching the military thinly across the globe, and while he apparently wants to throw more money at the gadgets soldiers might use (sold to the military at a premium price by Bush’s corporate backers), the military is having to recruit less qualified soldiers and retain members who would normally be discharged for not being fit for service. The military is often a hard sell at any time, and knowing that you’ll likely be sent off to Iraq or Afghanistan to get shot at every day doesn’t make joining up sound like a particularly attractive career choice. The years of coverage of unhappy soldiers being sent to difficult combat situations and being pulled out of retirement with stop-loss orders only emphasize how permanent and unpleasant a job joining up with the military can be.
As a consequence, as the Army faces the looming possibility that it won’t meet its recruiting target for the first time since 1999, policies are changing to allow less qualified people in. One in ten new recruits into the army doesn’t have a high school diploma. The New York Times reported last week that the number of new soldiers who scored the bare minimum required to enlist on the military’s standardized entry exam has quadrupled. And this is after the Army sent out 1,000 more recruiters to sign up new recruits and even shortened the required term of duty to 15 months (supposedly) instead of two years.
On top of that, the Army just changed the procedure for discharging unfit soldiers in way that makes it much harder to get rid of the incompetent. Where previously, the battalion commander had the final say on who to discharge, now the decision is made another step up, away from the people who actually have to deal with problem soldiers on a daily basis. This may not sound like that cataclysmic a modification, but I like Slate’s analogy, likening battalions to families and brigades to neighborhoods. Not only is the bureaucracy on another level of magnitude, meaning that any request to dismiss a soldier on the grounds of his or her inadequate performance is often lost in the teeming inbox of a remote and busy supervisor, but it takes the personal urgency away from any such request. A battalion commander sees a potentially discharge-able soldier every day, sees the effect such a person has on their coworkers, and has to deal with the problems such a person creates. For a brigade commander, they’re just another faceless sheet of paper.
On top of the more functional effects this modification has, the military higher-ups have made it abundantly clear that the point of the change is to retain unfit soldiers. In the papers describing the reform, commanders are explicitly told that every soldier that is kept in the military rather than being sent home “reduces the strain” on recruiters. So if you perform abysmally, or abuse alcohol or drugs, now it’s likely that the military will be happy to keep you!
This is not the way that the military should think of their strategy to retain personnel. There is a growing urgency in expert commentary about the military that it must start thinking retention instead of recruiting. And frankly, this makes so much sense to me that I find it difficult to see why the top military brass hasn’t begun implementing such changes. Think of the military as any other company—faced with a desperate need for personnel, not enough new hires, and qualified employees quitting in huge numbers, which do you do? Drop your standards for hiring? Stop firing people for incompetence? Or start handing out bonuses and improving the food in the employee cafeteria to stop your current employees leaving?
The military’s focus on recruiting over retention makes even less sense to me because, to be honest, it’s hard for me to see why somebody would want to sign up for military service. I fully acknowledge that there are a number of personal factors that come into play in such a decision for me—I’ve never had to think of the military as a way to pay for college, my long-standing political beliefs made me certain that military service would be an exercise in frustration, and my deep aversion to P.E. classes in junior high indicate that basic training is probably not for me. But the experience that has made me the most certain that I would never sign up for the military was actually the experience of my father—the son of a former soldier, he was accepted and started at the Air Force Academy, and left during his first year. His litany of horrifying anecdotes about what made him frustrated enough to leave colored my views of the military from a very young age.
This isn’t to say that some people don’t enjoy the military, and for that matter, it’s mostly the Army that has the problem with retention, rather than the other branches of service. I have several friends and members of my family serving in the military now, and for some of them it’s a career choice they’re still certain of. But I still know that, glad as I am that my father didn’t continue in the Air Force, he would have made a very good soldier. And he didn’t leave the Academy because he thought it was too hard—it was because he was profoundly disappointed and frustrated with what he thought the military should be, and the hypocrisy and bad leadership of what it actually was. He left because the military didn’t live up to his expectations—and from what I have heard and read about the experience of Army soldiers today, that seems to be a big reason behind the Army’s problem with retention today. Soldiers aren’t happy, and feel like they should be able to expect a little bit more from the military. And for asking them to put their lives on the line, I think we should be able to deliver to them.
So rather than accepting lower-qualified people and retaining incompetents, the Army should be asking why so many people are leaving, and trying to keep the good rather than the bad. Maybe they’re meeting their recruiting quotas now by signing up more and more recruits without high school diplomas—but such recruits drop out much more often than those who actually graduated high school, making the current statistic of 36% of new hires who show up for basic training yet don’t even complete a first term of duty likely to rise, simply delaying the recruiting problem temporarily while we waste time and money training soldiers who will never actually serve.
I can’t help but be reminded of Sysiphus, described in Greek myth as being sentenced to forever push a boulder up a hill in Hell—but just as he shoved the boulder up to the summit, which would grant him his freedom, it always broke free and rolled all the way back down. The Army’s current practices are an exercise in perpetual pushing—but instead of just strolling downhill to start again, it means that Americans currently serving in the Army are paying the price with their lives. That’s no way to run a recruiting campaign.
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