An Army Poised to Snap

If a sales manager has trouble meeting their quota, there are a couple of options that could smooth things over with the boss man. Crack the whip, hire better salesmen or whatever you’ve got to do to get more units out the door. Otherwise the only other option is to lower the quota and see if the boss man notices or not. In the private sector the latter would get you canned in short time, but when the boss man happens to be the government, the bottom line we perceive is often not the real bottom line at all. In the case of military staffing, the bottom line for a Bush administration under siege is sexy headlines – positive, spinable and simple. Think nothing of the fact that there are drill sergeants at this very moment hollering at piles of clothes and gear on a floor that’s badly in need of a coat of wax. And whatever you do, avoid articles that mention the phrase ‘stop loss’ like the plague. Smile, remember 9/11 and wave that flag.

Because we’ve got good news, people! The Army’s recruiting goal for June was achieved, high fives and cigars all around, things are looking up. That is, the spin is looking up, as before this quota could be met, the Army had to silently adjust it from more than 8000 to just over 5000. With a mere four months left in the budget year, the Army lowered their monthly goals from May on for the sake of the Bush administration’s bottom line, no unspinable headlines. This is done in spite of the fact that with a mere four months remaining, the Army has barely achieved 50% of their quota for the year. Couple that with the lower standards in terms of high school graduation, criminal records and whatever drugs the recruit happens to be using regularly at the time, and it should be clear to everyone that if the numbers don’t come rolling in this summer, they’re never going to.

Ethically speaking, the books are definitely being cooked here, as was the case with corporations that have since collapsed from similar practices in recent years. The interpretation of reality based on the numbers is established in a dishonest way that benefits the leaders along with the organization’s appearance to outsiders, while leaving everyone else out to dry. In the military’s case recruiters are caught between needing to hit the numbers and their own ethical boundaries. Field commanders in turn have to shift resources to accommodate for the gaps growing larger everyday by trimming one unit just back from Iraq to strengthen another about to deploy. Often times this means a soldier who has already served a full term in Iraq is transferred to another unit deploying back over after being home for less than six months. They borrow from Peter to pay Paul, and in the process create a never ending wave effect of band-aid inspired reallocations that are decimating the morale, strength and cohesiveness of every unit involved.

The most shameful side effect of this personell shortage by far though, is the ‘stop-loss policy’ that continues to force soldiers who have already fulfilled their contractual obligation to redeploy against their will. The Army’s stop loss policy was greatly increased in scope during the summer of 2004, and stands to affect approximately 7000 active duty soldiers and 4000 National Guardsmen and Reservists. A former Army captain, who served in the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, characterized the current treatment of soldiers under the stop loss policy as “shameful”. “Many, if not most, of the soldiers in this latest Iraq-bound wave are already veterans of several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he wrote to the New York Times. “They have honorably completed their active duty obligations. But like draftees, they have been conscripted to meet the additional needs in Iraq.” President Bush’s concept of America’s sacrifice for the Iraq war is to turn the military from a voluntary fighting force to the involuntary state it now exists in without having to bear the political burden of reinstating the draft.

Bush’s comparisons of the Iraq war with World War II has raised the eyebrows of many veterans, who couldn’t disagree more. “You can’t have unity now (behind the Iraq war) when the public isn’t participating in the war. There is no draft…so the war is being fought by a professional army,” said Warren Josephy (captain of the 187th Field Artillery Battalion when he landed at Omaha Beach on June 8th, 1944 ). He contends that the military is different today than it was then because, “you don’t get that rich man, poor man, college graduates mixing in with the working guy that you had then.” The President has created an apathetic cultural phenomenon, where the slogan ‘Support the Troops’ can be seen on millions of automobiles all over the country without any significant outcry over a policy that hypocritically accomplishes the exact opposite. This great sacrifice the President refers to is the burden of a tiny portion of unlucky soldiers, rather than something the majority has to shoulder as well. For the sake of political viability in the face of a badly mismanaged war, like the corporation that cooked the books and eventually collapsed, it’s the minority of little people in the wrong place at the wrong time who act as cannon fodder for the sake of leaders who’re only looking out for themselves.

The stop loss policy is comparable to strategies used in the American marketplace, like the Columbia House or ‘book of the month club’ business models that mail out products hoping they won’t be returned. Only when a soldier refuses to accept the government’s offer, they’re given a Less Than Honorable discharge or worse, forfeit all education benefits earned through their initial enlistment contract and face criminal prosecution and possibly jail time. The government basically takes the position that the soldier can involuntarily return to Iraq or lose everything they’d already earned. Knowing that a majority of soldiers enlisted for the sake of college money and an edge over non-veterans for future employment opportunities, the government leverages their very desire for success and a good life to get what they want. Imagine if you will, your employer approaching you on a Friday with an ultimatum that you can transfer to their office in Alaska, or have your car repossessed and credit ruined.

One National Guard soldier impacted by this policy had reached the end of his six year enlistment, when he was issued orders that read, “You are ordered to active duty for the period indicated unless sooner released or unless extended…Period of Active Duty: Not to exceed 545 days. You are involuntarily ordered to active duty for a period not to exceed 730 days, such period to include the period for mobilization processing.” Aside from the fact that he was a National Guard soldier ending a six year enlistment, the orders are extremely vague in terms of exactally how many days they could force him to remain in Iraq. Deployment times have been growing by the rotation, with this soldier and others, as well as many Marine units embarking on 18 month rotations. To the average American sporting a ‘Support the Troops’ sticker, this number doesn’t matter any more than a 6 or a 12 month deployment, but for the troops there’s a world of difference between the situation at the start of the war compared with what they’re being asked to do now. Their role becomes more difficult and unfair by the month, while neither I nor most people reading this essay have anything more troubling than the ‘liberal media’ reports to suffer through.

Republicans have become masters of tricking their constituents into believing that dissent concerning the Iraq war turns the administration and everyone supporting it into victims. Nobody ever said being in charge was easy. Then again, not everyone proclaims they have the ability to do the job either. The ‘anti-Bush’ argument has become the standard response to anyone, such as myself, who takes the stance that things could be better than they are. The political response of ‘talk to the hand’ is the problem right now. When Democratic Senator Pat Murray proposed an amendment to close the funding gap in the VA, the response from Republicans was to insist that no such gap existed. We’ve now been informed by the White House that the gap she was referring to was in fact very real, and well over a billion dollars. Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg has introduced legislation to do right by those who have been forced into war through the stop-loss policy, calling for a $2,000 bonus per month for each of these soldiers. A similar ‘talk to the hand’ response from Republicans is undoubtedly imminent, but unacceptable. Americans need to make sure their representatives in Congress understand that.

We’re at a critical stage in our history now, where politics are more and more defining reality in America, and the ensuing chain reaction is unfortunately managing to turn back the hands of time. Decades of our history have literally been defined by the fight for equality in our society, and the result of all this is a country that people across the world hope to create for themselves someday. At this very moment the courageous men and women, who comprise our military, are suffering in ways that most Americans simply assume could not be. Most Americans have no understanding of what a ‘stop-loss policy’ is, let alone what it allows our government to do to one of their neighbors. The story of the National Guard soldier I mentioned is an undeniable reality, that has little to no chance of taking even a minute of airtime away from Tom Cruise or Natalee Holloway, and that’s a hard pill for me to swallow. Either we just don’t care, or politics have managed to change the very meaning of what it is to be an American, not to mention the real definition of a victim as seen through our eyes. It means something when our fellow countrymen suffer such injustices for the sake of political power. If we as a society, as Americans, choose to continue along this destructive path of indifference, regardless of the war’s eventual outcome, we all lose.