“The Pentagon was supposed to release its monthly report on military recruiting Wednesday but didn’t,” reports Salon’s War Room.


Raise your hands, kids, if you think you know why! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! It’s not a recruiting problem, sillies, it’s … uh … oh yeah, here we go:

“Military recruiting is instrumental to our readiness and merits the earliest release of data … But at the same time, this information must be reasonably scrutinized and explained to the public, which deserves the fullest insight into military performance in this important area,” [Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke told Reuters]


Now raise your hands if you understood that.

Graduating high schoolers are avoiding recruiters. Nobody wants to be cannon fodder, and there are problems with methods such as a recruiter’s inopportune phone call, told by a parent in TownOnline:

The military recruiters’ latest call for my son came last Saturday morning, well before 10 a.m. Bad timing: His prom had been the night before, and he wasn’t waking up for his Uncle Sam or anyone else.

More on those dastardly Bush-hatin’ statistics below:
More from Salon’s War Room:

Again and again over the last five years, the Bush administration has simply buried statistics that it didn’t like. When terrorism statistics suggested that the United States wasn’t exactly winning the war on terror, the State Department excluded them from its annual report on “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” When the economic news was even grimmer than it is today, the White House tried to kill a Labor Department report on mass layoffs. When governors started using a White House Office of Management and Budget report as a basis for complaints about federal funding for the states, the White House stopped publishing the report.

And last month, a report on overseas base closings disappeared from the Web site of the government commission that produced it. A Pentagon spokesman said the report was pulled because it revealed classified information. What was so secret? A source told the the Washington Post that the Pentagon’s complaint seemed to be that the report identified Bulgaria and Romania — rather than “Eastern Europe” more generally — as countries U.S. troops might use for training. If that seems like a minor distinction, then just maybe there was another explanation: The report criticized Donald Rumsfeld.


P.S. The TownOnline article is especially good on recruiting methods and shortfalls.