Thursday, February 15, 2007

Difficulty Recruiting

The Army continues to have trouble meeting their recruiting goals. Almost 12% of the soldiers recruited last year had criminal pasts. True, the crimes may have been committed when they were teenagers, but the number of 2006 recruits with a criminal past was about 65% more than the number of 2003 recruits with a similar past.

Couple this with the lowering of standards as evidenced by the increase in the number of recruits who have not finished high school or those who score poorly on the Army's aptitude tests -and you've got to wonder at the quality of our military.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It seems Bush & Co are happy to send anyone prepared to fire a gun. I have to disagree with pjcostas though, because as you rightly point out, Al, this policy has only been in force a very short time - 65% up in 2006, from 2003. The roots of misconduct by the military go deeper, and are more worrying than just 'a few bad apples', which is the usual excuse.