The headline: “Top General:
Americans Are Increasingly Lacking The Smarts And Fitness Needed To
Join The US Army.” Here's the story:
What we're seeing here is a statement
of frustration on the part of the guy whose job it is to recruit
cannon fodder... oops, I mean... a crack fighting force to defend the
American way of life against “terrorists” and other assorted
baddies. Now, to begin with, there is nothing new about this
problem; we've had it at least since the end of the draft and the
beginning of the all-volunteer Army. And even prior to that we had
the problem that a lot of the draftees simply weren't smart enough to
successfully occupy positions in the Army, even that of the iconic
infantryman, AKA “grunt”. One Vietnam-era answer for this
dilemma was something called Project 100,000:
As it turned out, soldiers brought in
under that program, AKA “Cat IV's”, numbered way more than
100,000 – more like well over 300,000. Why such a high number?
One reason was that the military was morphing into a social program –
give people a job, get them out of the ghetto, and so on. Good for
the economy and all that. And was that program a success (aside from
the negative racial overtones)? Most people at the time, and since,
have said “no”.
So lowering standards didn't work, and
when the Army became all-volunteer the recruiters really started to
feel the pain, only alleviated in times of economic distress.
(Desperation vs. patriotism as a recruiting tool – we still haven't
quite decided which we prefer.) Add to this the fact that even the
“simplest” Army jobs have become increasingly high-tech, with
digitization adding another level of complexity to jobs across the
board. The typical soldier trudging along with his backpack and gun
in our time is carrying an array of computers and gadgets that make
conditions in the Vietnam era and earlier seem downright primitive.
And they have to know how to operate all that stuff. Add to this an
increasing emphasis on small-unit operations, anti-terrorism, and
operations in urban terrain, and cognitive and decision-making
demands become even more severe.
So what's a recruiter to do? It's no
wonder they feel helpless at times. But what this story reflects is
not so much an immediate problem of how to fill the ranks as a
societal phenomenon. According to MG Batschelet, the main issues
are that too many of our youth are either fat or stupid (or both).
Not that he, or anyone else in the Army, publicly expresses it that
way, of course; that would be too insensitive. And even the obesity
problem is described as something that the Army can deal with if need
be. (It's amazing how much weight you can lose in basic training at
a Southern post in the summertime.)
Then we have the problem described,
euphemistically, as “moral disqualifications over an increasing
range of criminalized behaviors”. Reading between the lines, my
guess is that drug convictions constitute the bulk of these
disqualifications. But note the expression “increasing range of
criminalized behaviors”. Why is it increasing? Could it possibly
have anything to do with the “War on Drugs”, which has,
effectively, criminalized large segments of the population, mostly in
the interests of the “corrections” racket (which I've discussed
at length previously). When you create a nation of criminals in
order to satisfy a political/economic agenda, you can hardly complain
when so many people who might otherwise qualify for the military turn
out to have “moral” issues. (And no, I don't think it has
anything to do with sex. In our time? Please.) Even if we're not
always talking about drug convictions per se, we would still be
talking about ancillary convictions related to the drug trade, like
petty theft.
And who was most complicit in creating
this nation of criminals? Legislatures at the national, state, and
local level... over-zealous police... fanatical prosecutors...
Puritanical judges... the usual cast of characters, in other words.
To confirm this, look no further than today's headlines.
But wait, there's more. We also have
“erosion in academic qualification” and “declining high school
graduation rates”. To sum up, “slipping educational standards of
Americans is the most worrying trend for the future of the US Army”.
Well, OK... so, whose fault is that? One has to remember that our
public education establishment is entirely a creation of liberal
politics – of a liberal, “humanistic”, “non-judgmental”
attitude toward education, where just showing up is enough, everyone
gets a prize, and no one is allowed to fail. (So many of our public
schools are, in fact, little more than free day-care centers.) We've
already seen the impact of these policies in the private sector, with
the problems many firms have hiring qualified people. We've created,
in effect, an educated elite (mostly in the “technology” sector)
and allowed the rest to descend to the level of the “lumpen
proletariat” -- few skills, low motivation, no hope, no change.
And this has all been in service of a political agenda – maximize
the number of people in the “dependent class”, thus maximizing
the “mission” of government, thus aiding and abetting
collectivization and totalitarianism, AKA the “welfare state” or
the “nanny state”. And, bottom line, maximizing the power and
influence (and wealth) of politicians and bureaucrats, and of their
cronies in the “private” sector.
And this is all perfectly jolly – or
so our politicians seem to believe – until it comes down to the
military, where there's not as much room as there is in the private
sector for inadequacy, incompetence, and failure. And then it
suddenly becomes a big deal. Apparently, in order to protect the
mass of civilian serfs, wage slaves, and tax receivers, we have to
have a highly-skilled and “professional” military... composed of
the same people. How is this supposed to happen? At what point do
we find this parting of the ways between heroes and zeros?
Another way of putting this is that
what the military needs – military “values” -- was, for many
generations, compatible with what the larger society had to offer.
But this is, apparently, no longer the case – and as I said, the
situation has been building since at least the 1960s, the time when
(coincidentally – ahem!) liberal ideas of “education” gained
the upper hand.
So what's the answer? Well, on the
side of manpower requirements it might help to re-think the idea of
“perpetual war”, which is the basis for much of our foreign
policy. It might help to get our troops out of every nook and cranny
on the planet, and assign them to real defense rather than
empire-building. That's on the “demand” side. On the “supply”
side, it might help to reinstate standards in public education,
including standards of competence for teachers – but that would
involve waging another kind of war, namely on the teachers' unions,
and who has the appetite for that? (One answer would be to draft
them into the military. But then we'd only wind up with the same
problem, or worse.)
And I guess we could make Army jobs
simpler again – you know, go back to the Korean War era or
something. Problem is, other countries wouldn't cooperate, to say
nothing of non-governmental militarized entities like rebels and
“terrorists”. Or – we could convert over to robots and drones
at a faster pace, but we're already hearing murmurings that only
“boots on the ground” can guarantee that we can hold a given
piece of territory (to say nothing of taking it in the first place).
(Or as one wag put it, how do you bomb people back to the Stone Age
when they're already in the
Stone Age?)
Yes, it is truly a dilemma – but it
is one of our own making. A nation or empire that is hard on the
outside (“force projection”) but soft on the inside (a vast
leisure/underclass) is bound to fall; this has been the case since
ancient times, and there is no reason why we should expect to escape
this “iron law of history”.
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