Asked what he would tell gay war veterans returning from Iraq, “Texas Gov. Rick Perry suggested that gay veterans unhappy with the proposed anti-gay constitutional amendment should move elsewhere,” reports the Washington Blade.
Brilliant. That’ll alienate not only gay veterans but gay recruits, kind of stupid considering a few military recruiters are now kidnapping and brainwashing potential recruits and the Army is forced to retain GIs “it usually kicks out,” Keith Olbermann noted last night. “The guys, as the [Wall St. Journal] quoted one battalion commander, quote, ‘on weight control, school no-shows, drug users, etc.’”
By the way, Olbermann nailed the entire recruitment crisis on Countdown last night … below …
OLBERMANN: OK, we started with slight misses on the recruiting quotas, then big misses, then a moratorium, a one-day moratorium to remind recruiters what was legal and what wasn‘t. Now they were delaying the numbers, hiding the numbers. Besides the obvious, that people are not signing up, is there something wrong with the system that we‘re not recognizing?
JACOBS: Well, I think probably so. But that‘s the least of our worries. Our biggest worry is that we just can‘t recruit the numbers that we need. Even the Marine Corps, who typically has no problem recruiting people, has had difficulty the last few months or so.
Not only that, we rely so heavily on Guard, National Guard, and Reserve troops, because they provide us with the military occupational specialties that are in short supply in active duty ranks, and we require them there for the Guard and the Reserve people to perform extended duty in Southwest Asia.
If we rely so heavily on them, and their recruitment goals are not being met, we‘re going to have a very big problem a couple of years down the road.
OLBERMANN: To speculate about that time, Army recruiting down 42 percent in April, they lower the quota by 18 percent for May, still miss the quota by a quarter. Can you do the rough math here? At what point do we run out of the personnel required just for the commitments we already have?
JACOBS: Well, I think we‘re probably at the limit now. I think we may have if—another six months or so before things really get dire, and something significant is going to have to be done.
It‘s difficult, I think, for the Defense Department to come up with solutions, however. They‘re going to have to do things like you suggested earlier, keeping people we would otherwise throw out, lower the standards for people we do bring in.
You know, we‘ve had an all-volunteer army. We‘ve had nothing but high school graduates, fairly high standards, for the duration of the all-volunteer Army. And now we‘re at a point where we‘re going to have to lower the standards if we want to make the numbers, and it‘s going to be extremely difficult to do so without turning the Army into what it was in the ‘70s, after the war in the Vietnam, a really ineffective fighting force.
And that‘s unfortunate, for two reasons. First of all, I don‘t like to see my Army denigrated like that. And secondly, we have enormous worldwide commitments that we will not able to satisfy with that kind of force.
OLBERMANN: Yes, and additionally, we might wind up with Lee Martin and the Dirty Dozen, the way they‘re talking this way.
JACOBS: Well, we had that. When I was in the Army in the ‘70s, after Vietnam, after we came back from Vietnam, we had an Army that was greatly reduced in size, and not very good at what it did. We had an Army of Dirty Dozen people.
OLBERMANN: Last question, during the presidential campaign last year, the Republicans insisted, no draft, never, no draft. Let‘s take them at their word. But if there‘s no draft, what is there? Where does the military find the personnel it needs? Or what changes need to be done regarding those commitments?
JACOBS: Well, we‘ve already raised the sign-on bonus to as much as $20,000. I guess we could raise it more. We do have some active duty people who could be used in commitments that we have in Southwest Asia, in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have 37,000 troops still in Korea. Ostensibly, they‘re there only as a tripwire. All we really need is one American soldier there to die if the North Koreans decide to come across the DMZ again.
So we could deploy, oh, I guess the better part of a division, maybe two-thirds to a complete division, from Korea to Southwest Asia, and make it part of the rotation. We have some people in Europe still who could be moved, maybe 100,000 or so, and we could rotate some of them through. We ostensibly don‘t need them in Europe any more. The Russians are not coming across the Fulda Gap. And we have some units in the United States that haven‘t rotated through.
But at the end of the day, we‘re probably about six months away before we have a situation that‘s something of a crisis, and we‘re going to have to think up novel solutions right now if we‘re going to avoid that six months from now.
OLBERMANN: And those have been in scarce supply recently.
Jack Jacobs, colonel, U.S. Army, retired. Great thanks, Jack.
JACOBS: Good to be here.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann airs weeknights, 8 p.m. ET on MSNBC TV. E-mail Keith at KOlbermann@MSNBC.com.
