I feel sorry for recruiters. Iraq and Afghanistan are a mess and there are only so many adrenaline junkies out there. Cool commercials showing soldiers working with computers can’t hide the fact that people are being killed. Stop-loss and theater redeployment hurt recruiting efforts a great deal too. But that doesn’t give recruiters the right to use any means necessary to fill their quotas.
Military recruiters have increasingly resorted to overly aggressive tactics and even criminal activity to attract young troops to the battlefield, congressional investigators say.
Grueling combat conditions in Iraq, a decent commercial job market and tough monthly recruiting goals have made recruiters’ jobs more difficult, the Government Accountability Office said Monday. This has probably prompted more recruiters to resort to strong-arm tactics, including harassment or criminal means such as falsifying documents, to satisfy demands, GAO states.
According to service data provided to the GAO, substantiated cases of wrongdoing jumped by more than a third, from about 400 cases in 2004 to almost 630 in 2005. Meanwhile, criminal cases — such as sexual harassment or falsifying medical records — more than doubled in those years, jumping from 30 incidents to 70.
Why don’t they just bring back the draft? This war is important, right?
Throw some more bodies into the fight!!! We could field 2,000,000 more teenage killers into the middle east and let them slug it out with the homeboys!
Crap! this thing could be over in 20 minutes if we had any kind of backbone.
Tell Iran/Syria whoever that they “won’t wake up tomorrow morning” and be done with them.
Who cares if they rest of the world down’t like us anymore… They never did, and they never will. Live with it. At least they won’t poke us in the eye anymore.
You might not like, it but sooner or later we will have to fight these guys sometime. Better sooner than later. This whole thing is all about world domination … sound familiar? Back to the future we go again. What I don’t get is why the East thinks it could possibly win. If the ‘arabs’ send 1,000,000 freedom fighters into Israel after they have launched 1000 skuds from all three directions and start killing everyone to wipe them off the map. What do you think the US would do? Nothing? watch it on CNN? What would you do? It’s time to fight. Islam wants to go to heaven, let’s send them there.
#30 – Mr. H. Fusion – “a Vietnam General summarily shooting a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head”
This is taken from the Wiki ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen_Ngoc_Loan ) on General Nguyen Ngoc Loan:
“Though some critics still claim Nguyen’s action violated the Geneva Conventions for treatment of prisoners of war (Nguyen had not been wearing a uniform nor fighting enemy soldiers in the alleged commission of war crimes), the rights of POW status were accorded to Viet Cong only if seized during military operations. Those designated as guerrillas were subject only to the laws of the South Vietnamese government, which was often less willing to protect the human rights of its enemy when compared to the United States.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen_Van_Lem South Vietnamese sources said that Lem commanded a Viet Cong assassination and revenge platoon, which on that day had targeted South Vietnamese National Police officers, or in their stead, the police officers’ families; these sources said that Lem was captured near the site of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General Loan’s deputy and close friend. (In some accounts, the deputy was a victim as well; in others, the number of murdered relatives were as few as six.)
Just more info to form an opinion.
The bigger problem is that they are being pressured into getting new leads by their commands so they can meet quota. They feel too much pressure from above, so they have to resort to bad tactics to get the leads. They are still the ones doing the illegal acts, but it is a mitigating curcumstance.
If they were smart, they would just use the arabs techniques for recruiting and go around to all the churches and tell them that they need to fight for their God and country. Since, most of the pro-Bush people are religious extremists, it shouldn’t be too hard to convince them to follow their leader’s f****d up decisions. They can start with recruiting that nut case Kurt Cameron.