US lowers standards in army numbers crisis

Warning! Long post, lots of links, but worth the time if you interested in the current recruiting "difficulties."

OK, I saw this on the Fox News Channel's crawl and have been dredging the web since trying to find it (no, not non-stop, there was a girls softball game nestled in there, too!):

The US military has stopped battalion commanders from dismissing new recruits for drug abuse, alcohol, poor fitness and pregnancy in an attempt to halt the rising attrition rate in an army under growing strain as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An internal memo sent to senior commanders said the growing dropout rate was "a matter of great concern" in an army at war. It told officers: "We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend. By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That's 3,000 more soldiers in our formations."
[...]
Military experts warned that the move would make it more difficult to remove poor soldiers and would lower quality in the ranks.

A military spokesman told the Guardian yesterday: "It was merely a question of an additional set of eyes looking at an issue before we release potential recruits."
[...]
Asked what the new policy meant, John Pike from the thinktank Globalsecurity.org said: "It means there is a war on. They need all the soldiers they can get. But it is a dilemma. You need good soldiers more in wartime than peacetime."
[...]
An army spokeswoman said: "We are doing our best to decrease attrition level, but we have not and will not lower our standards for recruiting and retaining soldiers."

Yeah, and monkeys are flying out of my butt!

Here's the memo, which in military-speak is a message.

Here's some of what they're saying at Slate.com:

Now comes a new Army directive that attempts to alleviate the personnel crunch by retaining soldiers who are earmarked for early discharge during their first term of enlistment because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons. By retaining these soldiers, the Army lowers the quality of its force and places a heavy burden on commanders who have to take the poor performers into harms way. This is a quick fix that may create more problems than it solves.

Officially, the new directive merely raises the approval authority for discharges from the battalion commander level to the "special court-martial convening authority" level-generally a step of one command level, from battalion to brigade. This is a leap in the military command hierarchy; battalions are families, brigades are neighborhoods. Centralizing such matters at the brigade command level will make it substantially more difficult to discharge these troops and will lengthen the process significantly.

Here, however, is a statement with which I do not agree:

The fact that the Navy and Air Force have consistently met their recruiting quotas in the face of a global war demonstrates that there is no shortage of young Americans willing to join the military.

Apples to apples. First, the Navy and Air Force are not taking casualties like the Army and Marines, thus there isn't the notion that joining the former branches is much more dangerous that they were before the war. Second, the former branches' recruiting missions are significantly lower than the latter branches' missions. Therefore, they are able to make their missions from a pool of young men and women who are predisposed to military enlistment. The Navy and Air Force get theirs, and even the Marines used to get most of theirs from this pool, but the Army is only halfway to making its recruiting mission when this pool dries up.

Also, right now at this time in America, young Americans see two different militaries: the first is relatively safe and stays out of harms way. The other is dangerous and continuously places itself in harms way. Can you guess which branches go with which? This war is not like Vietnam, when all branches went to war. But even then, you enlisted in the Navy and the Air Force to avoid the fighting.

This is good:

Shouldering a rifle in the mountains of Tora Bora or on Fallujah's streets is a different story, however. Though the Army and Marines have to recruit less than a quarter of 1 percent of the eligible population each year, they are finding that America's warrior class is small. "There's a difference between those who want some life experience and those who want to fight," says a Marine recruiter. "And most of [the latter] sign up anyway." The focus should be on retaining those who gravitate to the tip of the spear instead of coercing those more comfortable with service than soldiering.

Something else I like:

If retention is the goal [change this to "Because retention is the goal], the military pay and promotion system needs a complete overhaul. First, retention bonuses should more closely mirror recruiting costs. Today they lag by more than 50 percent. Further, there is little science involved in setting incentives. Exit interviews need to become a systematic piece of the resignation process-just as they are in civilian companies-with an emphasis on using incentives to encourage people to stick around. The Department of Defense needs to find the marginal rate that would encourage the most service members to "stay soldier" while still saving on replacement costs.

Second, the lock-step, caste-based pay system needs to be scrapped. In its place, a risk-adjusted bonus system needs to be built to target the growing majority of soldiers who cite "hardship" as their reason for leaving the service. The current system pays soldiers working in air-conditioned office cubicles the same salary as soldiers slogging it out for 13 months in Najaf. For years, the infantryman was underpaid because he had no civilian proxy; computer technicians and aircraft-maintenance chiefs were paid bigger bonuses because of direct civilian competition for their services. Today, the infantryman has an option. It's called private military contracting, it pays six-figure salaries, and it's so flexible that you can set your own deployment dates.

Amen! Shoot, I've looked into this myself and I have nearly 17 years invested in this man's... person's... well, uh, warrior's Army. I have to ask myself, would it be worth giving up the Army's retirement benefits to make a six-figure income for, oh, say 5 years and then go back into the Army or Army Reserves or even the National Guard to pick up those last 3 years to get retirement at age 55? I'm 35 now. The last 17 years went by fast! I expect the next 20 to do the same.

Ah-hem:

The Pentagon must stop the proliferation of its private army. Today there are as many as 30,000 private military contractors serving in traditional military billets. They are paid up to five times as much as soldiers performing the same duties. Encouraging the privatization of soldiers when there is a severe shortage of riflemen is circular reasoning. While the Army and Marines struggle to increase their infantry ranks, the DoD is paying private companies lucrative contracts to act as personnel brokers. Where do these firms find the recruits? The military. So the government is paying hefty finders' fees to locate quality soldiers it recruited in the first place. Far from being castoffs, they are among America's best, mostly senior soldiers lured by pay and flexibility. They belong in the ranks of the Army and the USMC, not the NYSE. [emphasis added]

I'll let others be the judge whether or not I can be counted among the ranks of the best, but I am "mostly senior." At least in the enlisted ranks.

IRR Soldier and Kevin O'Meara will likely agree with this assessment:

Finally, a new reserve component is needed. The active reserve's one weekend per month and two weeks per year requirement no longer meshes with the modern workforce. The Individual Ready Reserve used to be the vehicle for citizen-soldiers who wanted a connection to the military in the event of a national emergency. But the DoD has run roughshod over the implicit social contract of the IRR. By forcing civilians four years gone from the military into involuntary 18-month deployments at low pay, the Pentagon has turned the IRR into a purgatory from which everyone is trying to flee.

I have nothing to add to that.

So, lots of interesting stuff there to chew on. Commentary from Slate.com, The Guardian, and little ole me.

Outside the Beltway