There are four ways someone can leave the Army prior to the end of a first-term contract:
* they cannot meet physical fitness requirements (that threshold has been lowered, considering who they are recruiting these days)
* they are found to be “unable to adapt” to life in the military (lord, what on earth qualifies as that — being exposed to IEDs on a daily basis — how does anyone adapt to that?)
* they declare they are a homo and DADT is invoked.
* they go AWOL (that’s obviously not legal).
According to the Army, more than 18 percent of the soldiers in their first six months of service left under one of the above four provisions. The peak of desertion rates was during Vietnam, but the numbers these days, while Dear Leader’s Big Endless Military Adventures go on, are still staggering. (AP):
Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.The Army spokesperson said more than 75 percent of deserters are male soldiers in their first term of enlistment, but didn’t know whether the numbers reflected those signing up for a short or long tour of duty (two to six years).While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.
…The increase comes as the Army continues to bear the brunt of the war demands with many soldiers serving repeated, lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military leaders - including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey - have acknowledged that the Army has been stretched nearly to the breaking point by the combat. Efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to lessen the burden and give troops more time off between deployments.
Also, the Pentagon isn’t punishing most deserters — they need the warm bodies.
Despite the continued increase in Army desertions, however, an Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures earlier this year showed that the military does little to find those who bolt, and rarely prosecutes the ones they find. Some are allowed to simply return to their units, while most are given less-than-honorable discharges.After all, the deserters can’t wait to get back into units where the Pentagon has created a climate where it recruits folks convicted of aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats.“My personal opinion is the only way to stop desertions is to change the climate … how they are living and doing what they need to do,” said Wallace, adding that good officers and more attention from Army leaders could “go a long way to stemming desertions.”
24 Responses to “Army desertion rate highest since 1980”
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“they cannot meet physical fitness requirements (that threshold has been lowered, considering who they are recruiting these days)”
” and making terrorist threats.”
“they need the warm bodies.”
Sounds like Chad Castagana (what happened with him, anyway?) and Cheetos Jonah Goldberg ought to make the cut for enlisting.
The AP reports fails to provide supporting numbers for their claim of highest since 1980. More detailed reports, citing numbers, say highest since the start of the Iraq war. The actual numbers showthat 2001, before the war had a higher desertion rate than 2007. Moreover, why fail to report this little tidbit?
:It certainly makes sense that when you ramp up your recruiting efforts in unprecedented ways you’re going to have a lot more people who decide this thing they signed up for in a moment of weakness or or macho posturing or whatever really isn’t for them after all. And that’s even before considering the significantly worse conditions that soldiers face.
(Somebody who signed up for the old army where a year at most of deployment was followed by a year at least of rest and training would in particular be dismayed by the current “we’ll deploy you as long as we damn please” policy.)
Eeeesh. About two years ago, they tried to recruit my little brother. My litle brother, who, because of his ADHD and a bad Ritalin reaction, has hand tremors. He can’t even carry a plate of food without shaking. His seargent more or less told him they’d figure out how to “waive” it. Yeah. Great.
Also because of his ADHD and various other learning disabilities, my little brother tends to freak out during high pressure situations. He often runs from verbal conflicts and I had a major fear that if he even got into boot camp, he’d go AWOL and get slapped with some kind of jail sentence or whatever it is they do to guys that go AWOL during wartime. It’s beyond obvious that he would fail both physical and psych profiles (were they caring about such things). But no, they were going to figure it all out and get him in anyways.
The irony here is that I tried also to join the Army Reserves ten years ago, when I was young and poor and wanted the money for education. I had a perfect ASVAB score. But lo, and behold, I didn’t pass my physical exam because one of my eyes had a refraction of -9. But when they were reviewing my little brother’s app, they said, “Oh, we see your sister applied ten years ago but we rejected her then. If she wants to join now, we’ll take her too.” Niiiiice. I kinda told them where they could stick it.
So before he could do his full on MEPS processing/testing, I lured my brother out to San Francisco for about two months, until he got over the idea.
And I’m glad I did, because I keep reading more and more stories about the government has been shafting the troops in terms of pay for their tours (by bringing them home one day short) and medical benefits (by claiming that they weren’t injured all that badly) and out in the field. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the soldiers that go out, even knowing that they’re going to get screwed over by our government. I can kinda see why we’ve got a desertation rate.
It certainly makes sense that when you ramp up your recruiting efforts in unprecedented ways you’re going to have a lot more people who decide this thing they signed up for in a moment of weakness or or macho posturing or whatever really isn’t for them after all.
Michael Moore in “Will They Ever Forgive Us?” prints letter after letter about soldiers who joined up, poor, for the education benefits. They needed the money and wound up shipped into the stupid war.
The family and friends writing the letters state this believing that Michael and the readers of the book will have sympathy for their plight. This does tend to be the case.
However, I’m reminded of a recent story about a captured Al Qaeda in Iraq member who said he only signed up for the pay.
Of course, he’s a terrorist and the GIs are defenders of civilization, right?…
Those numbers don’t surprise me. I work in the aerospace industry, and we get many stories from “the front” (see my post at http://theatricalmilestones.blogspot.com/2007/11/peace-is-my-product.html). the morale is pretty thin.
Is there a reward for snitching on these deserters. Seems like that would fit with Ol’ Cheney’s and Dumsfeld’s privatization plan.
The British usta pay good dough for merchant sailors delivered to their men-of-war……
No questions asked.
I’m a little confused. The first three are not “desertion.” Only going AWOL (which is so 1980s…we now say “Unauthorized Absence” or UA) is “desertion.” So are all of those linked together as “desertion” in the stats, or not?
You can probably find anecdata about people deliberately failing physical fitness standards, realizing they can’t hack it, or suddenly finding out they’re gay so that they don’t have to go back into the meat grinder. But they need to be a little more clear.
Also, you forgot the fifth way people leave the Armed Services: In a box. I’m sure that that’s at an all-time high, too.
Durr, when you read TFA they clearly define what they mean by “desertion.” Mea culpa.
Coffee first, THEN post…Coffee first, THEN post…
If they have a snitch line/site, let’s flood it with tipoffs about a certain Lt George Walker Bush, AWOL from the Alabama National Guard.
I hear he’s been spotted carving turkeys at Camp David, so he should be easy to catch.
No questions asked.
Michael Moore in “Will They Ever Forgive Us?” prints letter after letter about soldiers who joined up, poor, for the education benefits. They needed the money and wound up shipped into the stupid war.
So, wait. They thought the government would just give ‘em money to go to college without explaining that when you join the army you have to go fight the country’s wars? We really must have dumb soldiers if they don’t know that they have to go fight when the country is at war. My dad didn’t even have a high school diploma in WWII & he knew that.
“We really must have dumb soldiers if they don’t know that they have to go fight when the country is at war.”
sharon’s here to support the troops, I see.
So, wait. They thought the government would just give ‘em money to go to college without explaining that when you join the army you have to go fight the country’s wars? We really must have dumb soldiers if they don’t know that they have to go fight when the country is at war. My dad didn’t even have a high school diploma in WWII & he knew that.
No, Sharon. They thought they would be defending the country, not invading others. They thought they would be sent to war based on actual threats and not lies about WMDs. They thought the civilian leadership would ask them to risk life and limb to protect America not to pad defense contractors profits.
I guess maybe they were stupid…
But not as immoral, as well, as people who spitefully cheerlead such predatory and morally corrosive enterprises while sending others to do it for them.
Well, some are immoral and some aren’t. In any war you’ll have a certain number of gung-ho fighters who enjoy the fighting for its own sake, along with the usual banditry that goes along with it.
I do think it was stupid for anyone to trust leadership that would put a man like former Lt. Bush at its at least nominal helm. But we had plenty of “if you don’t support our leaders now you’ll be responsible for any dangerous failures down the line” guns held to our collective heads to create a huge moral/intellectual gray area.
These are the shadows people like sharon lurk in.
Check this out:
http://gold-platedwitchonwheels.blogspot.com/2007/11/glad-french-got-this-one-right.html
sharon is thrilled that:
Quoth sharon:
Um, sharon, can we reason this out a bit? The prosecutor’s reasoning would imply that “heads of state and government and foreign ministers, even after they left office,” can never be held accountable for even such extreme human rights abuses as torture. Which, if you think about it, means that the whole concept of crimes against humanity is a dead letter. At any rate if this reasoning were applied consistently. Actually of course there is precedent for ignoring it–when dealing with conquered, formerly hostile, government officials. Which implies that “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” are nothing more than conqueror’s justice, an empty parade of the vanquished.
Well, that may be how it seems it ought to be y’all “normal” folk, AKA “good Germans.” Until you lose.
If you want a world-conquering, imperial ruling military, well, according to the bigwigs at the Air War College back in 1984, when my Dad attended during Reagan’s “Project Warrior” movement, you want the Wehrmacht. Dad was all enthused with his lessons about how disciplined they were, what great kill ratios they racked up, what fine espirt de corps they had.
But they didn’t win the war. We did–us, the Soviets, the British, our allies.
Sadly since then our leadership has taken more heed of the methods and mentality of the forces we defeated than of the moral conditions that had some bearing on why we won.
It matters why we fight, and how. It matters whether we believe in law and accountabilty, or just in the correlation of forces.
Feel free to wave your flags and call for more slaughter of cannon-fodder on your side, sharon.
My dad fought in Korea, Vietnam and Detroit and I think he voted for Bush.
He’s practically inconsolable over the crimes of sending soldiers off to war in this latest installment of the ‘Let’s Bomb Grenada’ foreign fallacy program.
He went on such a heated rant when I was there a few months ago. I figured that he’d be slightly annoyed at the turn of events but didn’t expect the venom and white hot heat that I got. It took a few minutes for him to stop shaking with the rage that he holds for not only Bush and Cheney (the rich boy draft dodgers) but for all those ‘bumper sticker idiots’ that think that supporting the troops means throwing their lives away and screwing them out of proper healthcare and proper pay.
His attitude was interesting because he was a ‘lifer’ in the military. He’s still very pissed off at how the VFW and most other groups treated him after he got back from Vietnam. He was actually spit on by what is probably a modern day Fox News devotee and was dissed by the local VFW at a parade.
This brings me to mention the treatment of the returning soldiers from Vietnam. My what a change, and so cruel, and so quick… Isn’t the Bushist ’support the troops’ merely a few degrees off the way the soldiers from that war were and are being treated?
They aren’t prosecuting AWOL’s because of the irony. Interesting…
Petey, I take it you aren’t good with numbers, considering that we lost over 400,000 soldiers in WWII and fewer than 4,000 in Iraq. Hard to see how the 4,000 as an all-time high, as you stated.
A better, smarter way to put it would be that, for a full scale war, U.S. deaths in Iraq are at all all-time low.
Since you’re keen to finagle the numbers, seroj, why don’t we compare U.S. deaths as a percentage of U.S. total deployment.
Things look a little different now, huh?
Gosh, who knew that occupying a poor country with roughly the same population as southern california constituted a full scale war? One way you can tell the stupider wingnuts is that they manage to maintain in the same breath that we’re at war and that the war has been over ever since that Mission Accomplished banner went up.
In WW2, we had on the order of 20 times as many personnel under arms, defending a population les than half our current one. And the entire home front was mobilized. And of course the country’s business leaders took jobs running the war effort for a dollar a year, instead of trying to pocket tens of millions in graft.
The only thing comparable is that we’ve actually been fighting this phony war for longer than it took us to win WW2, with no end in sight,
“Things look a little different now, huh?”
Mezosub,
Actually, no. Unless you are saying that we had 100 times more soliders fighting in WWII. Sounds to me that you’re as bad at numbers as Petey.
why don’t we compare U.S. deaths as a percentage of U.S. total deployment
OK.
US Deaths in WWII: 416,800
US Soldiers in WWII: 19,996,639
% of Soldiers Killed: ~2%
US Deaths in Iraq War: 3,799
US Soldiers in Iraq War: 1,500,000
% of Soldiers Killed: ~0.2%
Sources: WWII, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Casualties_by_country
Iraq War, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm
http://www.wbir.com/news/regional/story.aspx?storyid=51621
World War II was approximately ten times as lethal to US troops as the Iraq war has been.
It can be argued, successfully, that Bush actually declared war on America and all that we stand for and then concocted the ‘War on Terra’ as a quick cover for those that fall for that kind of thing.
Media ownership has helped so much that it’s been priceless… Who said that ignorance is bliss must have been talking about cows at a farm…
I once researched the National Guard based in the Bowery in NYC as part of a multiple cemetery investigation for archaeological significance. When the US government firs convened it met in NYC and had a National Guard (the Fourth amendment ensured it wasn’t the only “state” militia) and after 9/11/07 the Congress met again in NYC. This particular later would be tried in courts martial after the “Draft Riots” during the American Civil War and was called out in march to protect Washington, DC later disbanded perhaps far from the riots on Brother Island in the Bronx. Another Guard unit was just aways up the street and it became part of the only privately funded Guard armory moved to the 7th Regimental Armory uptown. They perhaps were an original regiment under General Von Steuben, called the “Steuben Rifles” in the civil war. Kate Millet lived in the place next to Germania Hall.
What I can’t understand is that in the millions who served in the 10 year Vietnam War era I read maybe a couple of thousand National Guard soldiers actually even saw Vietnam, and as we know many escaped the Selective Service by joining it. I really feel that some of the best and brightest of our citizenry, they and enlistees, has been put at a severe disadvantage, serving next to contractors serving next to so-called “contractors” making x times as much as they do. I wonder, as was shown to be the case in Vietnam to harm Mexican-Americans (first issue of “Lowrider”) if someone else may be getting the short end of the stick and may be reflected in the blanket statistics hidden perhaps by the arguably failed policy of “don’t ask don’t tell”.
I had an American girlfriend who said just that. She served with the US Army in Germany as a German linguist during the Cold War and then found herself shipped out to Saudi for Desert Storm. She was genuinely upset that she was made to go to war. She said she’d joined to get a college education, and hadn’t expected to fight.
Mind you, that was then, when the Army was facing the Soviets off across the German border, and this is now.
Indeed, part of the idiocy of ruling US wingnut narrative these past few decades has been a lot of chest-thumping about how we “lost in Vietnam” (scare-quoted because it isn’t at all clear what we were trying to “win,” what that might have looked like, or that, aside from the severe damage we did to ourselves by the misadventure and the much worse harm to the Vietnamese and their neighbors, how and what the USA “lost”) because we Americans were no longer macho enough in general, and our military in particular was de-nutted. Hence movements like the 1980s “Project Warrior” I alluded to above, leading eventually to right-wing apologists for mercenary forces on the Thom Hartmann program claiming that it’s a good idea to hire orgs like Blackwater to escort diplomats and the like, and to outsource traditional military functions like logistics, food prep, and so on, because we “want our trained warriors to be warriors 24/7,” to reserve actual soldiers for actual fighting.
Well, actually, I think we really shouldn’t. There will always be some people who are fully suited to being mainly warriors, I guess–and I suspect there is a fine line indeed between them and the banditry I also alluded to. But generally speaking, we should want our military forces to be composed of people who can fight and acquit themselves well when called upon to do so, but don’t live and breathe for the opportunity to wage war. If we are to be a democratic republic (which I doubt the chest-thumpers care for us to be at all) then we need citizen-soldiers. We want these people to fight well, but also know that they are fighting as representatives of a (let us wish) peace-loving democracy, to which they belong and in which they expect to live most of their adult lives as peacefully productive and reasonably happy citizens, not fighting.
Therefore military service should include and emphasize fighting ability but should also balance that with carrying out useful work that has nothing directly to do with being a “warrior.” And our military used to be pretty good at being something like that, back when the truck mechanics and truck drivers and mess hall workers and so on were uniformed. Vice versa–if we have military bases overseas, presumably there is a reason why we think the place may become a combat zone, in which case it would be sensible for all the people who do routine work of this kind to also be trained, disciplined soldiers alert to the chain of command and contingencies in a sudden fighting situation.
So it is a bit odd for a person in the military to think they would have zero chance of being forced to fight, but not at all unreasonable for many people with specialized skills to presume that they would not be used as front-line cannon fodder. Especially since they were after all recruited under such terms. Especially people who already did many years service and were discharged, to feel betrayed if they are suddenly called up to perform tasks they were not trained for, in a war no one believes in.