Our ‘all-volunteer’ hypocrisy
Published 3:25 pm Tuesday, May 29, 2012
In his Memorial Day remarks, President Obama noted that for the first time in nine years, “Americans are not fighting and dying in Iraq,” and the nation was winding down its role in the conflict in Afghanistan.
Not uncoincidentally, the previous week it was reported that the “Army is getting tough on recruits and re-enlistments.”
According to internal document obtained by the Associated Press, last year the Army took in no recruits with misconduct convictions, or drug or alcohol issues — a complete reversal from the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when the Army lowered its recruiting standards, raising the number of recruits who entered the Army with moral, medical and criminal — including felony — waivers.
Recruits with misdemeanors, which could range from petty theft and writing bad checks to assault, were also allowed, as were those with some medical problems or low aptitude scores that might otherwise have disqualified them, AP reported.
In 2006, about 20 percent of new Army recruits came in under some type of waiver, and by the next year it had grown to nearly three in 10. After the Defense Department issued new guidelines, the percentage needing waivers started to come down in 2009, AP reported.
Rather than “getting tough” on recruits, the Army is more accurately abandoning the lax standards and big signing bonuses it adopted at the height of the Mideast fighting.
The reversal reflects that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a reality. This opens a rich pool of potential recruits, including the thousands of people discharged from the military under the law. Among those booted over the years were nearly 800 “mission critical” specialists, including pilots, intelligence analysts, medics and linguists — some of the very jobs the military is looking to fill today.
Unfortunately, the change also reflects our nation’s complete hypocrisy when it comes to our “all-volunteer” military. The lowering of recruitment standards during war, and the raising of them again after war’s end, is shameful. The message: Yes, you can die for your nation in a faraway war, but you’re not qualified to serve it in peacetime.
In 2009, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates bluntly said in a speech that most Americans see military service as “something for other people to do.”
With the ability to lower and raise of military standards to suit our needs, this specifically means most Americans see “dying for your country” as something for other people to do. And when they are done doing it, we don’t really need them anymore, seeing as how we lowered our “standards” to allow them in in the first place.
