Defeating our army

My cousin was in the Army, stationed in Germany during the cold war. His duty for a while was commanding an anti-aircraft battery. He described it like this: “I commanded a $58 million missile launching system. I had a lifer sergeant, who really knew his stuff, but the men who actually had to aim and fire this intricate computer guided system were a bunch of high-school drop outs who never really learned how to operate the system. I figured if the Russian air force attacked, we could get the thing calibrated and get off a shot about the time the planes were over Paris. My only consolation was that I knew that there was a Russian commander a few miles to my east who had exactly the same problems.”

So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw this story in Slate. It notes, as many other stories have done lately, that recruiters are having a tough time filling their quotas for the Army and Marines. The Slate piece even reveals that we’re keeping undesirable soldiers in the military, in order to keep up the fiction that we have enough troops, when the commanders who have to deal with these bad soldiers would rather muster them out.

The Slate piece puts forth some really good ideas about how to address the problem of declining recruitment without resorting to keeping bad soldiers. It also points out one of the idiocies of the current “privatization” of military functions…the unintended consequence of bad military policy of the current administration. I became personally aware of this when a retired Marine friend of mine told me he’d been offered four times his Marine salary to lead what amounts to a private Marine rifle squad in Iraq.

“Who would be in this squad?” I asked. His reply, “Guys like me; guys we spent millions to train to be the best fighing men in the world, then pay them like crap and starve their families while they’re on deployment overseas.”

And, it seems, make them serve with guys who’ll get them killed, just so we can say we’ve got enough boots on the ground.

By the way, today is the 61st anniversary of D-day. Thank a veteran, particulary a WW II vet, today.