Look who we are training to be killers

To have knowledge of explosives, of methods of torture, of all kinds of weaponry:

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129 in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.

During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.

It has also increased the number of so-called “moral waivers” to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the Army’s moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide.

Update 2/15: The Heretik notices.

You can't leave the Army!

You're too dumb to live in the real world!



Those military recruiters might want to rethink their strategy.... note how many soldiers indicated they were planning on leaving the service.

(via Vanity Press)

Update: to counterbalance, a soldier's journal.

Soldiers feeling duped and deceived?

Yes. What else do you want to know?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In an action branded a backdoor draft by some critics, the military over the past several years has held tens of thousand of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on the job and in war zones beyond their retirement dates or enlistment length.

It is a widely disliked practice that the Pentagon, under new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, is trying to figure out how to cut back on.

Gates has ordered that the practice - known as "stop loss" - must "be minimized." At the same time, he is looking for ways to decrease the hardship for troops and their families, recruit more people for a larger military and reassess how the active duty and reserves are used.

"It's long overdue," said Jules Lobel, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and lawyer for some in the military who have challenged the policy in court.

"It has created terrible problems of morale," Lobel said last week. "It has in some cases made soldiers feel that they were duped or deceived in how they were recruited."

And a reminder of the barrel the military has been scraping, the recalling to duty of reservists, the lies they've had to tell to teenagers and potential recruits, the parents and soldiers who are saying no.

So duped and deceived? Yes.

All you ever need to know about the aptly named Max Boot

is that he's effing insane.

"A few years ago, in the wake of 911 when achieving the American Empire looked like somewhat less actual work than it does today, Max penned the most famous Boot-ism ever: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." Now, though, Boot despairs that the U.S is capable of generating sufficient troops from within our own borders to carry out that mission.

What happened was that instead of enlightened foreign administration, we got Iraq Proconsul Jerry Bremer in a business suit and desert boots, running satchels full of large, unmarked bills from the Oval Office to the Green Zone. It's a far cry from even the tailings of the original. And the administration's astounding series of screwups in that country has led to a situation in which Army recruiters are struggling to meet their quotas in every demographic. Max is now so discouraged by the scuffs on his boots and the dust on his jodhpurs and the stains on his once-pristine pith helmet sweatband that he proposes a wholesale redistribution of particular burdens.

"Some experts are already starting to wonder whether the war on terrorism might break the all-volunteer military. But because reinstating the draft isn't a serious option (the House defeated a symbolic draft bill last year, 402 to 2), some outside-the-box thinking is needed to fill up the ranks. In this regard, I note that there is a pretty big pool of manpower that's not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident."

In other words, pith on it: let's hire out the grunt work. We need another right hefty chunk of troops to spread democracy, and Max knows just where to find them.

What he proposes is the establishment of The Freedom Legion, a force to be recruited from among legal and illegal US resident non-citizens as well as through "recruiting stations from Budapest to Bangkok, Cape Town to Cairo, Montreal to Mexico City."

"The simplest thing to do would be to sign up foreigners for the regular U.S. military, but it would also make sense to create a unit whose enlisted ranks would be composed entirely of non-Americans, led by U.S. officers and NCOs.""

Via Atrios, BTC:

"Recruiting from among our own citizens and legal residents is tres expensive. The Congressional Budget office estimated a few years ago that adding 20,000 troops to the Army would cost $100 billion in the first five years and $10 billion annually after that, which numbers you can mulitply to account for many more troops and the difficulty of training and commanding a corps of soldiers for whom English might be a second, third or unknown language.

While we probably can find any number of willing recruits overseas, we might possibly encounter some resistance from local populations who hold both our government and its various military adventures in less than high regard, and from governments that may balk at the idea of US military training for those among their own citizenry who might eventually return to use that training against those governments. So, to the expense of recruiting, training, maintaining and commanding the Freedom Legion you can add that of protecting the recruiters and recruits in the far-flung lands we attempt to mine, exhaustively screening recruits to forestall the inevitable attempts to obtain the best military training in the world by people who wish us ill, and bribing the host governments into allowing us to do this.

Beyond the practical difficulties, which would be enough to scuttle the plan in any sane country, recruiting abroad would indelibly stamp the United States as an empire in official thought and deed. Boot thinks that’s a fine idea; one of his favorite Kipling quotes is “Ye dare not stoop to less,” from, appropriately, The White Man’s Burden. He once said of the US imperative to take up that burden that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”

And that, really, is all you need know about Max Boot and his ideas of what’s good for this country."

Don't say, I'll pretend I didn't hear.

Military recruiters ignore the Don't ask, don't tell policy.