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Bleak US Job Market Boosts Military Recruitment
WASHINGTON - Aided by a bleak job market, the U.S. military met all of its recruitment goals in the past year for the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in 1973, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
Aided by a bleak job market, the U.S. military met all of its recruitment goals in the past year for the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in 1973, the Pentagon said on Tuesday. (AP File) Military services have been stretched thin by conflicts in
Afghanistan and Iraq, giving added weight to recruitment efforts as
President Barack Obama considers sending another 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year.
The United States already has 67,000 troops in Afghanistan and about 119,000 in Iraq.
Pentagon officials said recruitment gains were fueled by the deepest U.S. recession since the Great Depression and an unemployment rate nearing 10 percent.
"For the first time since the advent of the all-volunteer force, all of the military components, active and reserve, met their number as well as their quality goals," said Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary of defense for military personnel policy.
The U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force sent a total of about 169,000 active duty recruits to training in the 2009 fiscal year that ended on September 30, beating their 164,000-member goal, the Pentagon said.
National guard and reserve forces sent about 128,000 recruits to training, beating their goal.
Carr said rising private sector unemployment was a force behind the increase in military recruitment but was not the only factor that "allowed us to be, for much of the year, in a very favorable position."
Curtis Gilroy, a senior Pentagon official, said a 10 percent increase in the national unemployment rate generally translates into a 4 percent to 6 percent "improvement in high-quality Army enlistments."
Recruitment does not come cheap. On average, the military spends between $9,000 and $10,000 per recruit, a figure that includes the high cost of advertising and of employing thousands of recruiters across the country, Carr said.
The Army spends far more, about $22,000 per recruit.
Reporting by Adam Entous; Editing by Bill Trott
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32 Comments so far
Show AllAll according to plan...
The PNAC crew must be very happy.
I often wonder if there is a master plan that has been so brilliantly thought out that our government actually planned out the destruction of the middle class so they can maintain the Department of Offense with voluntary recruits. Or do we find ourselves in the current situation simply by accident due to government corruption and greed. I keep going back and forth between the two scenarios.
As I try to figure at what is going on in this country should I be paranoid, cynical or amazed at the stupidity of it all. So much that is done to us is done behind closed doors that I'm just not sure what to conclude in the end.
I go back and forth about the same things NC-Tom. I think that the emphasis on the individual rather than the social and on the self-serving belief in the invisible hand of the market will correct everything have led to a situation where massive looting prevails while building and planning for the common good has been allowed to fall by the wayside. That invisible hand of the market belongs to a pickpocket, not to a helpful friend.
Free market ideas have been supported and pushed by academia and business and conservative think tanks. There are niches for young conservative twits to be spokespeople for these ideas. There is a big niche for young people of color, frequently from privileged backgrounds in third world countries, to become funded and give some ostensible world cred to these ideas.
Enterprises driven by the immediate profit motive dominate. Projects whose benefits are longer term like education, public health, infrastructure, R&D for peaceful uses and developing clean industry have no champions in positions of power. The normal popular champions for the public, such as labor unions, small farmers' organizations, coops and socialist type parties have been decimated here by repressive electoral structures, corporate power, their own mendacity and delusions about the benign or morally neutral nature of capitalism at this time when it has grown too big, too corrupt and too powerful to act with agility or good intentions in the service of the nation or the world.
So generally I favor the less conspiratorial view, although I grant that there are some like those spawn of Friedman whom Naomi Klein talks about in "Disaster Capitalism" who are more deliberate in creating social chaos and misery so that they can tighten their grasp around our throats.
Joe
Reason says that you are probably right, but "the powers that be" must know that this is unsustainable and will at some point, come crashing down. It seems like we came right up on that financial precipice about a year ago, and I think we are still driving right along that same edge right now. It must be sheer greed that is driving their reckless behavior.
I'm also glad you mentioned "Think Tanks". I understand from what I've heard from at least one insider is that they come up with the conclusion that they want to arrive at first, then write the paper backwards so they can make it appear that they arrived at their conclusion is some type of scientific way. So in the end most of what they base their "theories" on is basically a bunch of B/S.
I really love the absurdity of the free market system that an average American is supposed to live under. Once we leave high school we are supposed to go into debt to private banks for our education. Once we graduate from college we should go into debt again to buy a car so we can drive back and forth from work to pay back those first two loans. Then once we save up enough money for a down payment we should go into debt one more time to buy a house, from yet another private bank.
Next we should work our butts off to pay for health insurance, home owners insurance, and life insurance from more for profit companies. Now whatever money we have left we should pay another private company for long term care insurance, in case we have to go into a nursing home when we get old.
Oh yea I almost forgot we should also be putting money away into a 401K plan to save for our retirement, and maybe even setup another private savings plan to help pay for our kids college education.
Man it sure is great to be a free man in the good old US of A. I can do whatever I want in life, anytime I want as long as I do everything else outlined in the above paragraphs first...
Your description of modern serfdom, or a great big national company town, should be posted under Barbara Ehrenreich's article about declining happiness. Even if you do everything you are supposed to do, never make a mistake, life is often a trap. One of my kids, who had a body and soul crushing job to pay back his massive education loans, put it this way - "You work hard and do everything you are supposed to and you still end up in jail."
Joe
Any given state university is that expensive and I know of absolutely none who have been able to attend college without taking student loans or having a grant available to them. You sir are indeed a zombie because what you say doesn't reflect anything that anyone living and going to school today is experiencing.
You are hung up on the whole college thing and ignore the rest of the things the conservative ownership society expects you to do for yourself. Im guessing you are fairly young and so having successfully navigating college has left the biggest impression on you. I'm at the other end of life and for the most part successfully negotiated the ownership society minefield.
I also came from nothing. When I graduated high school I got a grant to go to a computer technical school, and got into the computer field early before a college degree was almost a requirement. I did very well, paid off my house in my late 40s, have a pension, health insurance as a retiree, lots of savings, yada yada yada.
So Im in my early 50s and for the first time in my life I am about as free as possible that one can be in this country. I don't have to work anymore if I don't want to, and after kissing corporate butt for over 30 years that is very sweet indeed.
Congratulations on your wise financial choices in obtaining your education. It was made possible by heavily subsidized higher education available close to home and you siezed the opportunities.
Living at home with your parents after High School may not be good for emotional and social development for everyone, for every family. Even if you manage that arrangement through college, it is much more difficult for the advanced degrees required in order to practice many professions. Graduate programs are more specialized, expensive and do not exist in every community.
It is impossible for most people to get an advanced degree, to become a doctor for instance, without going into deep debt, unless they come from a wealthy family. Even a low salary job in say biological research may require a PhD.
It would be to the benefit of society to do more to help students achieve their highest degree of training if the student works hard and gets good grades.
Joe
Intent does not require a detailed or cohesive plan formally agreed upon by an entire social class.
By individually centralizing power, the upper class causes all that we bemoan. Of course they have some awareness of which policies centralize their personal power. They support those individually and in groups.
Don't let the lack of a cartoon-variety smokefilled room dissuade you from the deliberate and lethal intentionality of all this:
-- We know there is research on crowd control armament
-- We know that fresh arms were tried out in Pittsburgh on demonstrators, passerbys, and residents.
-- We know there is ongoing research on propaganda techniques and that the Mad Ave crowd wildly feted the 0bama campaign's success in convincing most Americans that 0 is anti-war and progressive, despite all evidence.
-- We know there are efforts to centralize ownership of media, particularly to end Net neutrality.
-- We know the machinations of government and finance remain largely secret: government resists informing its citizenry. Who owns the Fed? What are the names and ranks of American torturers? Where did the supposed "bailout" money go?
What possible scenario would not include misleading the citizenry about policy and practice?
Folks, all "conspiracy" means is secret accord. We know the meetings of public figures are private. Either almost all those meetings are useless, or conspiracy is the basic modus operandi of American government and corporations.
We have, further, a lot of evidence on the shape of repression that will result if the American population resists imperial efforts.
Government will attempt to persuade peacefully by propaganda, information control, and economic incentives and disincentives.
It will raise expenses for education, converting grants to loans so that graduates have to work for high-bidding corporations as opposed to underfunded reform operations.
That failing, it will combine police action with slanted reporting to minimize adverse publicity coming from demonstrations and civil disobedience in general.
It will single out minorities and individuals that it can demonize for extreme, demonstrative punishment -- witness the assassinations in the '60's and in foreign countries, COINTELPRO, recent actions against Muslim organizations, and the torture of John Walker Lindh, among others.
Great post. Looks like Im not getting paranoid after all...
Somewhat of an aside:
Your comment "Don't let the lack of a cartoon-variety smokefilled room dissuade you from the deliberate and lethal intentionality of all this" reminds me of an earlier time in my life.
Years ago (in the 70's), in order to get a group rate on health insurance, I joined the state Chamber of Commerce. (There was no local chamber and some insurance company offered group rates to chamber members.) Anyway, when I joined, they asked if I wanted to serve on any committees, and so, being a good citizen, I checked off the "Environmental Committee".
I went to the first meeting and it WAS a "cartoon-variety smokefilled room". All of the industry insiders sat around smoking and through the haze of their smoke, the order of business was "How can we defeat this clean air legislation".
So, the rooms may no longer be smoke filled, but these guys actually do sit around and conspire on how to cheat and manipulate their fellow citizens.
Be all the contract killer that you can be.
Maybe it has something to do with taking the focus off of fighting someone who never attacked us and taking their non-existent WMD, and focusing on the people who provided shelter, training grounds and support for those who DID attack us.
Like it or not, the Taliban's goal is the eventual world domination of their radical version of Islam. They have to be eradicated before they get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons because they are crazy enough and stupid enough to use them!
"They have to be eradicated before they get their hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons because they are crazy enough and stupid enough to use them." Hmm sounds familiar, as in Hiroshima. Now, please give us the "God is on our side rant" to justify the invention, use and storage of these life supporting products to further the spread of empirical love.
You are so wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind. The U.S. was a supporter of the Taliban to the tune of some $300,000,000 dollars until early 2001. The Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to a neutral party for detention until trial if the U.S. would show them some proof of its contentions concerning al Qaeda (created by the CIA during the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan), but of course, in its customary arrogance the U.S. refused that offer in favor of invasion. The U.S. had been negotiationg pipeline deals with the Taliban. The "shelter and training grounds" for those Saudis who supposedly attacked on 911 took place right here in the United States. The Taliban had also banned the cultivation of poppies, but with the invasion of the U.S. the pragmatic Taliban allowed the resumption of the production of opium as a source of funds for their resistance against the U.S. occupiers. The Taliban is primarily of Pashtun ethnicity which is about 50% of the population. The Taliban is not a monolithic organization, and it has no way to spread its "radical version of Islam" let alone "world dominatin" even if they wanted to, which they don't.
So far there has only been ONE country, one group of people, white Christians based in the United States, not brown Muslims based in the Middle East and south Asia, that has been "crazy enough" to use nuclear weapons against another race and religion of people in a foreign country in cities composed primarily of civilians.
I doubt the Taliban want world domination. According to eyewitness reports, most of them cannot even read or locate the USA on a map. They are rural people who want to run their families and villages according to a harsh version of the old time religion. They are not sophisticated and they are not coming here.
Joe
Your "Taliban" came from planet in another galaxy.
Ooga booga.
Why would you imagine this?
-- The Taliban did not continue a fight against the Soviets when the Soviets left.
-- They did not use the collapse of the Soviets as an opportunity to create mayhem.
-- They have not made any movement towards nuclear armament.
-- They did not attack Pakistani government forces until they themselves were attacked.
-- They did not attack the US.
How, then, is the Taliban vision of world domination different from that of, say, the Mormons, many of whom believe that their church is theologically correct and who would welcome more people into the fold?
They are not a particularly egalitarian bunch in their treatment of their fellow Afghanis, but of course neither are Karzai and the warlords.
As another example, how are Taliban ambitions different from those of any American political party that proselytizes?
The key thing that I see is that the leading American parties ARE in favor of invasions, and the Taliban is not.
I would say the need for "boots on the ground" -- and the unwillingness of the powers-that-be in Mordor-on-the-Potomac to reinstate the draft -- means that little, if anything, will be done about the civilian job market here at home. Gotta keep that "cannon-fodder" rolling in, y'know. Who among the powers-that-be really cares about the poor bloody grunts, so long as the dream of American world empire is kept alive? Even if it breaks the bank and renders the country economically a shambles, it's worth it to the elites (most of whom have never worn a uniform or even fired a gun in their lives).
Of course, just as they'd hoped.
BTW - I noticed our troop numbers in Iraq. This is drawing down? Classic Pentagon bullshit. There are maybe 1000 less troops in Iraq today than just before Bush's surge nearly three years ago. So technically yes, Obama's drawn down the troops in Iraq. So, now they can all say, we won, war's over. Pay no mind to the 119,000 left and the 200,000 private contractors. That's nothing. They're just security "advisors" to help the Iraqi's. Now let's implement the same surge, bribe, and hit squad strategy in Afghanistan.
But, I digress. The more anticipated economic inevitability by Obama and our corporate elites is just on the horizon; depending on when the dollar craps out. For now, Obama's recovery plan for job creation is to let go big fat yawn.
Maintaining high unemployment numbers are imperative for the anti-labor polices by both parties in Washington. They must ensure wages are driven down, down, down, so corporate profits on exports can be maintained when the dollar takes a nosedive. Reality will become unavoidable to everyone who still fawns over President Faust. Perpetual and staggeringly low wages are here to stay. When Obama grants blanket amnesty to the millions of illegals already in the US, it will accelerate the race to the bottom for every working American. It will also cause many heads to explode.
Ha! A lead photo to make Progressives whoop for joy; a sea of white faces signing up for possible death and destruction. Ever thus, advancing to increased diversity.
You fat cat bastards should be careful who you turn into a trained killer. What's gonna happen when they figure out what is going on?
"Bleak US Job Market Boosts Military Recruitment"
It's almost as if the oligarchs planned it that way. Cheap cannon fodder for their empire, loyalty assured by a heavy dose of jingoism, fundamentalism and abuse to turn these young kids into good little authoritarians, conservatives and republicans, on our bucks.
This is so sad.
Being a soldier in the military is the worst of the worst careers.
One who does this has sunk as low as one can go, on the spectrum of jobs.
BO can send as many troops as he wishes. The bottom line is that his children and mine will not be part of those troops. Stopped going to anti-war rallies because they were not having any impact. All they did was to confine us behind some chicken wire like demented mental patients. In my free time I look around for neighborhood kids that the war machine easily preys on and try to convince them of other non military alternatives. Some schools are reporting up to 30% military recruitment of graduating seniors.
It comes down to this: three hots (meals) and a cot. (a bed to sleep in) plus a generous socialized benefit package with a guaranteed paycheck.
What kind of dysfunctional women is the military cranking out?
Who ever thought that verbally abusing young girls could be a good thing?
Is this what an officer and a GENTLEMAN is supposed to do?
Is this much different than what the Taliban do to their women?
Join the military and spread the authoritarian, conservative, republican disease.
The picture appears to be for Officer Training School (Navy). That may be why we see all the white faces. It seems to be a recruiting photo with the Drill Instructor yelling at a officer candidate (as though that is the worst thing to happen).
Then again none of the people in the photo have to be in the military for them to make a recruiting photo, poster, or video.