Excuse me, where's the Army?

Graph showing parents and other advisors who are less inclined to endorse enlistments to young people. From McClatchy News.

I found this story through McClatchy News:

THURMONT, Md. — The Army is struggling to find volunteers for an unpopular war, despite recruiting bonuses of up to $20,000 and pay increases for enlistees that have beaten inflation by 21 percent since 2000.

It met its numeric goal of 80,000 recruits last year, but it paid a price in terms of declining numbers of high school graduates and lower scores on skills and physical tests. The percentage of minimally qualified Army recruits, known as Category IVs, has quadrupled since 2002, and the percentage that required special health or moral waivers has risen sharply as well.

And many recruiting problems preceded the Iraq war.

So what's really making good Army volunteers so hard to come by and, in a larger sense, sapping America's ability to fight a ground war or occupy foreign soil?

Pentagon and outside experts cite these factors in order of importance:

* While risks to U.S. troops are far lower than they were in most previous wars, young adults and their parents find them unacceptably high.

* Parents who went to college want their kids to go to college. So do parents who didn't. As the college-bound percentage of high school students has risen to two-thirds, the percentage that intends to enlist in any branch of the military has fallen by nearly two-thirds.

* Draft-era veterans, who for generations provided role models for military service, are dying off. A Pentagon study projects a 14 percent decline in high-quality recruits from a 10 percent drop in the veteran population.

* Most parents, grandparents, ministers and others whose approval potential recruits seek don't endorse enlistment these days.

* African-Americans, who joined the all-volunteer force in disproportional numbers for years, have cooled on military service recently. So have Hispanics.

* Except among those who sign up, duty to country isn't an important value, according to Defense Department polls.

Army Staff Sgt. Brandon Van Dusen, 26, a low-key Iraq infantry veteran who recruits in Thurmont, Md., a leafy, friendly farm town 50 miles northwest of Washington, sees all these factors. But the most powerful one, according to Van Dusen, who describes his own combat stint as "mostly boring," is fear, among recruits and their parents.

"They all figure they're going to get sent to Iraq, be in a firefight in the first 10 seconds and die," he said.

Now McClatchy reports that deaths among U.S. troops deployed in Iraq average 2.3 soldiers per day. Currently there are 169,000 U.S. troops serving in Iraq. During the Second World War, the daily U.S. death toll was 307 soldiers killed. According to University of Pennsylvania demographer Samuel Preston and co-auther Emily Buzzell, the death risk for U.S. troops in Iraq is about a fifth of that for the U.S. soldiers who served in Vietnam. According to Preston, "People do seem extremely surprised" by the numbers because they "severely overestimate the death rate in Iraq." But what McClatchy, and the Army, do not realize is that it is not about the death rate of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but the perception that an individual, who joins the Army, will quickly be sent into the U.S. war in Iraq. If you enlist, the Army's going to send your ass to Iraq. And with American public support turning against the war, young Americans are turning away from enlisting into the Army, even as the Army continues to lower standards, and add more incentives and bonuses to new recruits.

And there is another aspect of this story that the Pentagon has really ignored. The U.S. has been involved in this war for over five years. The American public has seen so much of this Bush administration's incompetence in the planning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reconstruction of Iraq after the U.S. invasion, and the failure of the U.S. military to secure the Iraq once the ethnic civil war had started. This is about the Bush administration's lies to the American people in order to drum up support for the war, the intelligence cherry-picking, and the PNAC neocons' marketing strategy to make the U.S. an imperial power in Iraq. This is about the lack of U.S. troops to occupy the country, the lack of body armor for individual soldiers, and the lack of armored humvees. This is about the corruption of the current Iraqi government, the corruption of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the waste of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that have disappeared. This is about endless extended tours of U.S. soldiers, and the "flat daddies." This is about Blackwater, and the contractors that shoot at Iraqi civilians first, and then refuse to ask questions. All of these details link together into a colossal screw-up by this Bush White House in sending the U.S. into this disastrous war in Iraq. The American people realize this, and they want no part of this war. That is why the Army is struggling to find volunteers--no one wants to fight in this war in Iraq.

You would think that the Pentagon would realize this. I guess not.