Pitting the WaPo's 'Volunteer Army Is Doing Great!' Op-Ed

[RTFirefly]

@Martin Hyde

There’s certainly trouble I just fail to see how that trouble is somehow related to the “volunteer military.”

It’s the only military we’ve got. If the military’s having problems, then the volunteer military is having problems.

In no way is it the fault of those in the volunteer military. Just the way that, if I were to try to drive my car 1000 miles at 150 miles an hour without stopping, it wouldn’t be the fault of my car, or its designers and manufacturers, if anything went wrong.

And I also am just going to bring to the forefront the issue of the military draft, which is what most people who bitch about the “volunteer military” seem to advocate.

OK then, what do you do if you need more troops than the volunteer army can provide? Pray for ponies?

The military leadership has quite openly said we do not need more American troops in Iraq

Ever hear of a guy named Shinseki?

I guess guys like General John Abizaid, who have said we do not need more American troops in Iraq are lying, or possibly too stupid to understand the issue?

Abiziad has also said we are unable to put more troops into Iraq on a sustained basis.

Funny coinkydink that the maximum number we seem to be able to sustain there, by hook and by crook, is also magically the right number, and more couldn’t possibly help, but fewer troops would also be bad. Or maybe he got the Shinseki memo.

What pressing manpower need is there that would justify a military draft? And if there is no pressing issue such that would justify a draft, can we really say there is a problem with the volunteer military?

Look, it’s really simple: there are a lot of very bright people in the military, including at places like West Point and the Army War College and so forth. They think about military issues, great and small, and even go so far as to write (IIRC) peer-reviewed papers and stuff.

One of the things they surely have had to think about is, how many combat troops they can field, for how long, given the current attributes of the volunteer army?

The point being that if you’re going to try to field more troops than that, for longer than that, then you’re going to either need a bigger volunteer army, or you’re going to need to institute a draft. Or settle for fewer troops in the field than you’d like, or for less time than you’d like.

Can I get agreement on this, that those really are the only options?

In mid-war, particularly in mid-war in a war that isn’t going so well and meeting recruiting targets has been a challenge, a bigger volunteer army is off the table. You could’ve done it before the war (one more argument for waiting a year to invade Iraq, if they were adamant about doing it eventually), but now you’re stuck. Either fewer troops than ideal, or for less time than ideal, or a draft.

At this point in the devolution of the Iraq war, talking about a draft is silliness. It might’ve made sense in early 2004, when it might’ve delivered troops into battle by, say, late last year. But if we were to start gearing up tomorrow to draft and train conscripts, there’d be no point. Iraq’s already lost, and it’ll be even further down the tubes by the time we got draftees into combat.

But that still doesn’t negate the main point that the volunteer army is engaging in a whole string of responses to overload conditions. And that in and of itself means the happy talk by those credentialed two doofuses paints a false picture of how well the volunteer army is really bearing up.

[Loach]

@RTFirefly

Whom I would characterize as elite combat units. At any rate, the characterization of the Blackhorse unit as "elite training troops " isn’t mine: it’s one that was used in all the stories I’ve seen about the decision to send them to Iraq, including the one at the link.

In this, I expect you’re right - sounds like you know more about this than I do.

BUT (see my response to Una) would they have made that move if the army wasn’t in the least bit stretched thin? It may indeed make perfect sense to use them in Iraq, just the way finding ways to use airmen and sailors on the ground in Iraq to free up more Army troops for combat makes sense in this situation.

But there’s a pattern here where they’re doing very unusual things, some good, some bad, but in all cases as a response to unusual need.

At the end of the day, though, there are only so many rabbits they can pull out of the hat. Increasing the enlistment age to 42 - good. Using the Blackhorse Cavalry in Iraq - makes sense too, now that you’ve explained it. Using airmen and sailors in Iraq - that too. But as a group, they’re responses to overload. And while some of them can (and some should) be sustained indefinitely, some (like sending the Blackhorse Cavalry over) are a one-shot deal, while others (like using the Navy as ground troops) aren’t ones you’d want to continue into peacetime, and others (like rotating troops back to Iraq on short rest) are ones you’d prefer not to have to do even in the current situation.

So when the volunteer army is doing a whole bunch of things to respond to being overloaded - some good, some OK, some questionable, and some downright bad - I think I’m standing on solid ground in saying that a fluff piece filled with happy talk about how wonderfully the volunteer army is doing while fighting two wars, etc., is quite the wrong picture.

Are you pitting the army or the article? The article was basically answering one argument for the draft that Charlie Rangel has, specifically that the ranks of the military are filled with the poor and down-trodden. They used facts to support their position. Can you refute those facts? They specifically stated there are problems with the all-volunteer force but not to the extent that a draft would help. You seem to have a problem with two or three lines out of the whole piece rather than what it was actually about. Not very pit-worthy in my opinion.

[John_Mace]

@RTFirefly

If they had simply rebutted Rangel and left it at that, I’d have no problem with that.

But they had to go beyond that, to say the volunteer army is doing a terrific job all around, and to leave the impression that the issue Rangel raises is the most serious question that’s been raised concerning the success of the all-volunteer army in its present situation.

What they say is, in effect, Rangel’s wrong, so everything’s great.

If you look at what they actually say, they keep their praise to the ability of the miltiary to meet its staffing requirements. The closest they come to saying what you think they’re saying is:

Regardless of one’s opinion of the management and progress of the war on terrorism, the concept of an all-volunteer force has been an amazing success by virtually any measure. The U.S. military is sustaining combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq while continuing to meet obligations around the globe.

Now, “sustaining combant operations” is faint praise indeed. He doesn’t say we’re winning in Iraq or even that we’re doing the right things there-- in fact he explicitly says he’s not considering that. He’s only saying that we are there, in the numbers requested by the Pentagon.

If you want to find the key point that an expository essay like this is trying to make, always look at the last sentence of the first paragraph-- that’s where we all leanred to state our thesis way back in HS. This is what they say there:

But although there has been considerable concern that an all-volunteer approach could not possibly fill the ranks in wartime, both recruiting and retention of military personnel have remained strong during more than three years of American military operations in Iraq.

That’s it. The military is meeting its own “recruiting and retention” goals. Besides, I don’t think either you or I think the problem in Iraq is a lack of troops. The problem is that the military is trying to do something, establish and maintain peace in a foreign coutnry, that it isn’t capable of doing.

[John_Mace]

You know, as I look at that article again, it actually looks very poorly written, because it seems to be two articles in one. It starts off in the first 3 paragraphs talking about whether or not the military is meeting it’s recruitment goals, then comes back to that theme again in the last paragraph. Then you have the middle section (paragraphs 4-9), which addresses Rangel’s concern about too many poor people in the military. Those could be 2 completely separate essays, and I wonder if one guy wrote one part and the other guy wrote the 2nd part. The essay jumps back and forth discontintuously between the 2 themes as though the two writers hadn’t even talked to each other.

[Loach]

@John Mace

You know, as I look at that article again, it actually looks very poorly written, because it seems to be two articles in one. It starts off in the first 3 paragraphs talking about whether or not the military is meeting it’s recruitment goals, then comes back to that theme again in the last paragraph. Then you have the middle section (paragraphs 4-9), which addresses Rangel’s concern about too many poor people in the military. Those could be 2 completely separate essays, and I wonder if one guy wrote one part and the other guy wrote the 2nd part. The essay jumps back and forth discontintuously between the 2 themes as though the two writers hadn’t even talked to each other.

Or it could have been edited that way. It wasn’t writen by newspaper people. It may have been chopped up a bit to fit.

[RTFirefly]

@Martin Hyde

And what’s the issue with taking people who have a checkered past in the military? The military isn’t finishing school, and many “gang bangers” are products of their environment, raise them in the suburbs and they are just as nice and polite as your buttoned-down suburban “good boy” who sings in the choir and mows his grandmother’s lawn.

Y’know, I’m not used to hearing the equivalent of “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived” from conservatives. I’m almost speechless. (Good thing I’m typing rather than talking. :))

Nonetheless, the military’s standards have had some reasons behind them:

One beneficiary of the Army’s new moral-waiver policies gained a certain prominence this summer. After Steven Green, who served in the 101st Airborne Division, was charged in a rape and quadruple murder in Mahmudiyah, Iraq, it was disclosed that he had been “a high-school dropout from a broken home who enlisted to get some direction in his life, yet was sent home early because of an anti-social personality disorder.”

Recently, Eli Flyer, a former Pentagon senior military analyst and specialist on the relationship between military recruiting and military misconduct, told Harper’s magazine that Green had “enlisted with a moral waiver for at least two drug- or alcohol-related offenses. He committed a third alcohol-related offense just before enlistment, which led to jail time, although this offense may not have been known to the Army when he enlisted.”

Also, just based on common sense, having neo-Nazis and other racists isn’t exactly a great idea in a very integrated Army. If you’re a nonwhite serving in Iraq, you don’t want to have to be worried that some skinhead is going to leave you in a dangerous spot a few minutes longer than necessary simply because he doesn’t like your skin.

Anyway, back to you, Martin:

@Martin Hyde

IQ is also not an important metric when recruiting someone in to the military. Recruits take the ASVAB, and have to perform to a certain degree of proficiency to be accepted. IQ is a metric that is not uniformly defined nor even accepted as a good strict-test for intelligence by most anyone, and not one that is uniformly accepted or measured, in any case.

OK, let’s talk about the ASVAB, then, because like you say,

@Martin Hyde

The modern military is tough, technical work

and we need recruits with at least some smarts and ability to read and learn, to handle all those high-tech weapons our guys use as force multipliers.

This year [2004-05] the Army set a goal of recruiting 80,000 active-duty soldiers, but it wound up with just 73,000—almost 10 percent short. As a result, the Army Times reported this week, the Pentagon has decided to make up the difference by expanding the pool—by letting up to 10 percent of new recruits be young men and women who have neither graduated high school nor earned a General Equivalency Diploma.

More than that, the Los Angeles Times reports today that 4 percent of recruits will be allowed to score as low as in the 16th to 30th percentile—a grouping known as “Category IV”—on the U.S. Armed Forces’ mental-aptitude exam.

As of 2003 (the last year for which official data are available), just 6 percent of active-duty Army soldiers lacked a high-school diploma or a GED. Just 1 percent scored in Category IV on the aptitude test.

Not since the mid-1980s—when the military brass first decided to reject low-scoring applicants—have the all-volunteer Army’s standards been allowed to dip so steeply.

Several career officers are dismayed by this new policy—not least because it reverses the progress that has been made these past two decades in the buildup of a professional army.

So this move may be justified under the circumstances, but it’s far from ideal, it’s not the sort of thing you’d like to do if you have choices - we are eroding standards in response to the reality that recruiting’s far more of a challenge than those guys suggest (“the military still has tens of thousands of young men and women on waiting lists to join the active-duty force”) and the fact that our overloaded army can’t afford to just take fewer recruits.

[RTFirefly]

@Loach

Are you pitting the army or the article?

The article.

The article was basically answering one argument for the draft that Charlie Rangel has, specifically that the ranks of the military are filled with the poor and down-trodden.

But (as I’ve said) it was using their ability to rebut Rangel to make a much broader claim. I’ve explained that their ability to rebut Rangel is essentially irrelevant in terms of justifying that claim.

You seem to have a problem with two or three lines out of the whole piece rather than what it was actually about. Not very pit-worthy in my opinion.

“What it’s about” seems to depend on how you read it, I guess. I read it as being “about” both doing a smackdown on Rangel, and using that as a springboard to paint a far better picture of how the volunteer army is holding up under the strain of its current commitments than is remotely justified.

That false picture is what I’m Pitting. If you don’t think that picture is worth Pitting, or if you don’t think that’s what they’re painting, then you would have reason to think this was a weak Pitting.

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

If you look at what they actually say, they keep their praise to the ability of the miltiary to meet its staffing requirements. The closest they come to saying what you think they’re saying is:

@Beland and Gilroy

Regardless of one’s opinion of the management and progress of the war on terrorism, the concept of an all-volunteer force has been an amazing success by virtually any measure. The U.S. military is sustaining combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq while continuing to meet obligations around the globe.

Now, “sustaining combant operations” is faint praise indeed. He doesn’t say we’re winning in Iraq or even that we’re doing the right things there-- in fact he explicitly says he’s not considering that. He’s only saying that we are there, in the numbers requested by the Pentagon.

It is, if you go by chapter and verse. But what we’ve seen throughout this Administration is that they’re not talking to the rational parts of people’s brains; they’re just doing things like using “9/11” and “Saddam” in close proximity, knowing that (a) millions of Americans will assume that means they’re connected, even though (b) if you look at the words all lawyer-like, it turns out they never said it in so many words.

Same thing here: unless you’re parsing things carefully, you’re going to mentally insert a “such as how” (or its equivalent) in between those two sentences in the quote box. (Hell, I did it myself, first time through: took those two sentences as a general statement, followed by specific examples.*) If the Administration’s past use of wording is any guide at all, you are meant to read the “amazing success” to apply to how the military is sustaining combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and maintaining its commitments around the world.

If you want to find the key point that an expository essay like this is trying to make, always look at the last sentence of the first paragraph-- that’s where we all leanred to state our thesis way back in HS.

Hold on - just because you were told in HS that that’s where your thesis should go if you’re writing a proper expository essay, doesn’t mean you can reverse-engineer, go to that spot in the essay, and say, “here’s their thesis.”

*Speaking of things you’re told to do in expository essays.

[Una_Persson]

@RTFirefly

OK try this: suppose the military suddenly put out the welcome mat for gays, and abandoned don’t-ask-don’t-tell. That wouldn’t just be good; it would be great news. But would it be one more indication of their desperation? Of course it would. If you only come around to doing something good because you find yourself in a pickle where you have to, the fact that you did the right thing doesn’t negate the fact that it’s a sign of desperation.

Here, if it’s not desperation, it’s at the very least unusual need that appears to have driven all these changes, some good, mostly bad.

I see what you mean. I guess you’re right, that does support your OP. I withdraw my nitpick and apologize to you.

Una

[Scylla]

I ran the JFK 50-mile run last Saturday. You end up meeting a lot of temporary friends as you and somebody else find they’ve matched pace and spend a few miles together.

It’s hardly scientific, but I’ve run a lot of long races and run quite a few miles talking to servicemen. The ones I’ve run with seem to be pretty top notch people doing exactly what they want to do.

One guy does stand out from last Saturday. I spent about 5 miles on the C&O canal with an Army Ranger who got blown up in Iraq 8 months ago. A suicide bomber who had changed his mind tried to change it again while they were taking his vest off, and one of the Rangers’ friends pushed the bomber into a ditch and yelled at everybody to hit the deck. The guy I was running with wasn’t quick enough and was caught in the shadow of the blast. About half his body was sandblasted by rock and dirt. They had offered him a medical discharge but fought not to take it and is going back to Iraq. He’d spent the last six months in the hospital, had skin grafts, and fighting infection while they picked bits of grit and suicide bomber out his skin. The scarring was pretty bad.

I’m not really down with anything that marginalizes this kind of commitment.

I know it’s a fashionable meme among some to portray the volunteer army as a bunch of poor inept people tricked into serving when they would do something else if they had half a brain and who only are in the service because they’re too dumb to flip burgers.

I’m not naive enough to beleive that bad recruiting practices do not occur and that people are sometimes in the service who shouldn’t be.

Nevertheless, I find this ragging on the volunteer army to be self-serving and incredibly shitty. They are doing their job, and doing it as well as can be expected, and the volunteer army has been a tremedous success.

[RTFirefly]

@Scylla

I find this ragging on the volunteer army to be self-serving and incredibly shitty.

I fully agree with you, Scylla.

Please point out the miscreants, so I may respond to them as one may do only in this forum.

[Absolute]

Washington Post. Wash-ing-ton Post. No one knows what the hell a wapo is.

[RTFirefly]

@Absolute

Washington Post. Wash-ing-ton Post. No one knows what the hell a wapo is.

AFAICT, we’ve got a pretty intelligent group here. IANAL, but IMHO, they can tell what a WaPo is. YMMV, of course.

[John_Mace]

@Absolute

Washington Post. Wash-ing-ton Post. No one knows what the hell a wapo is.

No one knows what a wapo is, but I think most of us know that WaPo = Washington Post. I often use that abreviation.

RTF: In that last post of yours responding to mine, you starting talking about the Bush administration and its duplicitous use of language in general. I’m not going to argue with that. They have taken the brainless soundbite to new lows. Whether these guys are doing the same in this article, I don’t know. You could be right, but there certainly isn’t any reason for them to do so in this case. They’re arguing against the need to reinstate the draft, and it’s not like that’s some fringe position that most people disagree with.

[Steve_MB]

@John Mace

The other key thime that Rangel offers-- that a draft would lessen the likelihood of war – is something that I think few people would dispute.

That may be true. If so, the fact that few people would dispute a claim that flies so squarely in the face of the evidence shows that the battle referenced in this site’s masthead is going even more poorly than the one in Iraq.

The verdict of history is clear: politicians will start wars when they choose to do so, and whip up public opinion to go along, draft or no draft. If anything, a draft makes it harder to get out later, as it creates more people on the home front with a powerful emotional investment in the belief that their son/daughter/sibling/parent/whatever must not be allowed to have died in vain.

[Steve_MB]

@John Mace

We’re not talking about history-- we’re talking about the US in the modern era.

Let’s roll the tape:

Vietnam: We had a draft, we wandered in and escalated ourselves into a major involvement.

Central America: We dropped in every so often, both before and after the suspension of the draft.

Kuwait: No draft, we went in, took care of business, and (mostly) got out.

The evidence for your claim is, at best, equivocal (which is to say that your claim simply is not supported).

[RTFirefly]

@John Mace

RTF: In that last post of yours responding to mine, you starting talking about the Bush administration and its duplicitous use of language in general. I’m not going to argue with that. They have taken the brainless soundbite to new lows. Whether these guys are doing the same in this article, I don’t know. You could be right, but there certainly isn’t any reason for them to do so in this case.

@WaPo

Russell Beland is deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for manpower analysis and assessment. Curtis Gilroy is the director of accession policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Both authors are political appointees of the Bush Administration. This Administration controls message rather tightly; think this op-ed didn’t have to be cleared by the White House before it was submitted to the WaPo?

They’re arguing against the need to reinstate the draft, and it’s not like that’s some fringe position that most people disagree with.

But they’re using that, as I’ve said, as a springboard to give people the impression that the volunteer army is not having problems with handling its current set of missions.