Military Misses Recruiting Goals Again in 2007

From NationalPriorities.com:

For the third consecutive year, the Army missed DoD benchmarks set for educational attainment and scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The DoD has a goal that 90 percent of new recruits have a regular high school diploma or better.

...The proportion of active-duty Army recruits in tier 1 has dropped from 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. While the benchmark of 90 percent was also missed in 2005, the percentages have not been this low for at least 20 years. In 2006, the result was 73.1 percent.

Nevada with 54.1 percent, Montana with 58.2 percent, and Mississippi with 59.2 percent had the lowest percentages of recruits that were tier 1.

Considering that a high school education is the single greatest predictor of whether the investment we put in these young men and women will stick, perhaps we should take a good, hard look at the reasons people don't want to go: they're entering an endless war without the right equipment where Bushie can write "As long as I want" on their contract, regardless of what they signed. If they get physically hurt, they'll get poor care, and if they're psychologically affected by killing and seeing friends and enemies die, you'll be ignored.

Hey, maybe if we stopped feeding the military industrial complex our young men like logs into a wood chipper, fighting a war we can't win for the benefit of corporations, then maybe we wouldn't have this problem. Maybe we could focus on getting the young man or woman a GED instead of worrying that they don't have one before giving them a weapon and tossing them in the shit. Just a thought.