Out of Jail and Into The Army
Be all you can be.
This article from Salon does not bode well for the future of our nation’s fighting forces. Then of course, we have the poverty draft kicking into gear, where as more and more jobs are lost, education opportunities are removed for those other than the richest and most privileged, what will be left other than resorting to the military as one’s only ladder out. Is this by design by the economic royalists taking control of our nation today?
According to statistics provided to Salon by the office of the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, the Army said that 17 percent (21,880 new soldiers) of its 2005 recruits were admitted under waivers. Put another way, more soldiers than are in an entire infantry division entered the Army in 2005 without meeting normal standards. This use of waivers represents a 42 percent increase since the pre-Iraq year of 2000. (All annual figures used in this article are based on the government’s fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. So fiscal year 2006 began Oct. 1, 2005.)
In fact, even the already high rate of 17 percent underestimates the use of waivers, as the Pentagon combined the Army’s figures with the lower ones for reserve forces to dilute the apparent percentage. Equally significant is the Army’s currently liberal use of “moral waivers,” loosely defined as criminal offenses. Officially, the Pentagon states that most waivers issued on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets. Yet documents obtained by Salon show that many of the offenses are more serious and include drunken driving and domestic abuse.
Last year, 37 percent of the Army’s waivers (about 8,000 soldiers) were based on moral grounds. Like waivers as a whole, these waivers are proliferating - they’re 32 percent higher than in the prewar year of 2000. As a result, the odds are going up that the soldiers fighting and taking the casualties in Iraq entered the Army with a criminal record.
“The more of those people you take, the more problems you are going to have and the less effective they are going to be,” said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan and a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress. “This is another way you are lowering your standards to meet your goals.” Retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, who was the Army’s chief intelligence officer from 1981 to 1985, also called the increase in waivers “disturbing.”
He expressed concern that the lower standards would place a burden on military commanders who have to deal with “more lawbreakers and soldiers with anti-social behavior in their units.”
Even without the waivers, the Army has lowered its standards for enlistees. The Army has eased restrictions on recruiting high school dropouts. It also raised the maximum recruitment age from 35 to 39. Moreover, last fall the Army announced that it would be doubling the number of soldiers that it admits who score near the bottom on a military aptitude test.
on February 8th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Using the word waivers is very generic. I like sound reporting, but this is not it. Had they included the percentage of the types of waivers, then maybe it would have been good reporting. But to say the use of waivers is up 32% from last year. I would have been real impressed had the reporter dug into the Moral Waivers. When I enlisted back in ’89 you could not have EVER used coke and not used pot more than 3 times. Given the liberal attitude of colleges these days, maybe the increase is because of recreational drug use. We don’t know. The reported did not provide all the facts.
For the record, I was enlisted under a waiver because I had major reconstructive surgery on my thumb. In my case it was a medical waiver and not a moral waiver.