Is the Army using a shell game to give a false impression of its recruiting success?
That’s a dangerous accusation, but a critical issue. In light of President Obama’s promise on the campaign trail to increase the end-strength of the military by 92,000 troops (65,000 for the Army alone), the Army’s numbers should accurately reflect how they’re doing.
Last week, the Pentagon issued a press release stating the Army had not only met but actually exceeded its recruiting goals for FY2009. Army Maj. Gen. Donald Campbell thumped his chest in the Washington Post soon thereafter, crediting the Army’s number of recruiters on the ground as a critical component of its success.
Unfortunately, the Army is using some creative accounting to bring about that success. To meet its goals, the Army simply lowered them — by ten thousand fewer new recruits in 2009 (vs. 2008) and ten thousand fewer re-enlistments. Or, as Fred Kaplan notes in Slate:
[T]he Army this year lowered not only the recruitment goal but the retention goal too, from 65,000 in 2008 to 55,000 in 2009. And it actually held on to fewer soldiers than it did in either of the last two years (68,000 in 2009, compared with 72,000 in 2008 and 69,000 in 2007).
So here is the situation. The secretary of defense ordered, and Congress authorized, an expansion in the size of the Army. But the Army reduced the recruitment goal — and reduced the retention goal. The size of the Army is in fact shrinking. It may look as if it’s growing — the Pentagon report gives the impression it’s growing — but it’s growing only in comparison with the officially set goals.
For Army “recruitniks” (a term usually applied to my friends’ insatiable desire to follow Charlie Weis’ efforts to cajole 18-year-old kids to play college football at Notre Dame), the situation comes as little surprise. In an excellent exposé in September, the National Journal made two key points about the Army’s recruits:
Never before has the Army had so many soldiers with so much experience; never before have so many soldiers been so exhausted.
The article concludes:
Today’s Army may be equal to the U.S. population in its demographic representation, but it is also separate.
And it is getting more so all the time. That reduces the chance that declining public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cause Army morale to collapse, as it did in Vietnam. Still, it raises a different danger. “I don’t think they’re going to get burned out,” said retired Col. Patrick Lang, a Vietnam veteran. “But they’re going to get harder and harder, and more detached from the values of civilian society.”
Unless the military puts out an honest assessment of where its recruiting is, none of these problems will be fixed any time soon.
