July 06, 2006
Defeat from within
The Bush team has made it very hard to fill jobs in the military, so recruiters have been scraping the bottom of the barrel, and the SPLC says they've been vacuuming up some real vermin. As about a third of the armed forces are racial minorities (here is some 2001 data), one speculates only with real alarm about the effect on military capacity when the services have been sprinkled with folks who think that third is the enemy and appropriate targets of deadly force.
If you wanted to profoundly sabotage military effectiveness, which is known to depend at bottom on mutual dependency and bonding among enlisted personnel (soldiers don't fight and die for their country or abstractions, they fight and die for the guys next to them), could you do better than putting vipers like these skinheads and racists in uniform and turning them loose in the barracks?
"The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq."
I'm having trouble reconciling this statement with this other one that I came across. They both can't be right.
"The Army goal for re-enlistments for fiscal year 2006 was for 40,000 soldiers to extend their active duty commitments. With four months remaining in the fiscal year, they have already exceeded their goal of 40,000 and may have to go back to Congress for authorization to exceed their force structure manning limitations. Since Congress has been pontificating for the past couple of years that the Army is woefully under strength, that should not pose any difficulty."
"Recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to join the military, a watchdog group said."
As I understand, this amounts to a press release from the SPLC. It's hard for me to confirm this, as a non-subscriber, but the claims do seem to mirror this SPLC press release:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?site_area=1&aid=197
Past experience leads me to take any claims made by that lot with a great deal of salt....
Posted by: Brett Bellmore at July 7, 2006 09:52 AMThis is news? The services have been filled with these people for decades, hence the law banning them.
Posted by: mr.ed at July 7, 2006 02:35 PMThat would be the same army that won't recruit people like Jeff Gannon. Except they did. Or did they? Was he really a soldier or did he just play one in (censored and deleted).
Shadows and fog.
I can tell you, though, that minorities are not amused by rascists. On the surface they may act politely, but inside they dislike rascists. As do I.
This is of a piece with the widely reported presence of street-gang members in the military. I assume the same factors are at work.
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