July Recruiting Statistics: So Far, So Good

The Pentagon announced August 10 that all services' active-duty components met their July recruiting goals, as did three of the six reserve components. News reports indicate that the Army and the other services will reach their annual quotas for the recruiting year ending September 30.

What does that mean? Didn't President Bush talk about the "soft bigotry of low expectations?"

Operation Yellow Elephant views military recruiting quotas as a minimum, not a maximum, to fight and win the Global War on Terrorism. Our recruiters' making their mission is good, of course, but doesn't let our national leadership, or their strongest supporters, off the hook. The GAO Report on recruiting improprieties is quite relevant here, as recruitment of the now-world famous PFCs Lynndie England and Steven D. Green has strategic implications.

The Pentagon continues to cite the widely discredited and basically irrelevant 1999 (i.e., Clinton Administration) Heritage Foundation study purporting to show that the backgrounds of military recruits basically match our nation at large.

We've been fighting the Global War on Terrorism for almost five years now. Can't somebody do an update of recruits' demographics? Doesn't the Bush 43 Administration want to show real Americans who's volunteering for military service now?

Or maybe they don't, because they don't know any of them.