Our Outstanding Effective All-Volunteer Armed Forces Is At Risk

Congressman John Murtha made an unusual stand for a former marine with a hawkish reputation and a long history of support for our Armed Forces. Then a few months later, an Israeli military expert, Martin van Creveld, called invasion of Iraq "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them." He is a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, "the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers."
Our all volunteer army is struggling with morale, inferior armor, unprepared by training or with proper equipment or tactics for an insurrection. They are suffering unnecessary casualities, facing high rates if PTSD and despite being wrecked emotionally, they are being sent back to Iraq to suffer more incalculable damage to their psyche.
Slate

In response to the tightening trends, on Sept. 20, 2005, the Defense Department released DoD Instruction 1145.01, which allows 4 percent of each year's recruits to be Category IV applicants—up from the 2 percent limit that had been in place since the mid-1980s. Even so, in October, the Army had such a hard time filling its slots that the floodgates had to be opened; 12 percent of that month's active-duty recruits were Category IV. November was another disastrous month; Army officials won't even say how many Cat IV applicants they took in, except to acknowledge that the percentage was in "double digits."


(These officials insist that they will stay within the 4 percent limit for the entire fiscal year, which runs from October 2005 through September 2006. But given the extremely high percentage of Cat IVs recruited in the fiscal year's first two months, this pledge may be impossible to keep. For the math on this point, click here.)


[...]In a RAND Corp. report commissioned by the office of the secretary of defense and published in 2005, military analyst Jennifer Kavanagh* reviewed a spate of recent statistical studies on the various factors that determine military performance—experience, training, aptitude, and so forth—and concluded that aptitude is key. A force "made up of personnel with high AFQT [armed forces aptitude test] scores," Kavanagh writes, "contributes to a more effective and accurate team performance."

Hat tip to The Next Hurrah.