Knee Deep in the Hooah!

Remember the old adages your mother used to use on you? You know you can hear them ringing the in your memories of old, and you also know (now that you are older) that she was right! How about this old one?

“Sticks and Stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you.”

How many of them can you recite? Many I am sure! So, let’s talk about sticks and stones today. That is the one that feels appropriate to me. Where my son is concerned there are many dangers he faces in Baghdad that can break his bones and hurt him seriously. Sticks and stones are the least of his concerns and worries these days, and being called names does not phase him in the least at this moment. It does, however, phase me. It doesn’t only phase me, but it makes me very angry.

Perhaps it makes me more angry than it should, but many families who have loved ones deployed feel very protective of their soldier — actually many of us feel very protective of all of our men and women in the Armed Services. Maybe it is our only way of feeling that we are somehow reciprocating the sense of protection, love and sacrifice that we know they are giving to us. As a parent it is very hard because in the grand scheme of life it feels backward and askew that your child would surpass you in life experiences where death and danger are concerned. It feels awry to have to accept that the one you protected for so many years has now surpassed you in the ability to protect. It is just one of those facts that I have had a very hard time reconciling fully. I can accept it on a cognitive level, but emotionally it is difficult.

So, onto the subject matter at hand. Who is calling our troops names this time? Ted Rall is of course. I refuse to post his disgusting, insulting, mordacious idiocy, passed off as a political cartoon, on my blog. If you have not seen the disgusting troop bashing cartoon of which I am speaking you can see it HERE. In this cartoon Rall slanderously refers to our soldiers as: stupid, poor, uneducated, blindly obedient, and are doing what they do out of some religious fervor akin to radical Islam. He parallels our soldiers with the profile of a suicide bomber. Rall insults, degrades and slanders the very citizens in this Country who will bear arms, march into war, and fight to the death — to their very last breath, to defend his right to speak freely. The irony is rich and disgusting. There is nothing delicious about it.

I do have to say that I appreciate the fact that Rall is so blatant and honest about his hatred for our Troops. It is a luxury these days to have a foe who is honest! At least he is not deceptively coaxing us in with a pro-troop message, only to lower the boom by insulting us with some sentiment of how he “supports the troops, but not their mission.” I appreciate the fact that he flat out says he does not support them. It’s always nice to know where you stand. That is refreshing! Now we don’t have to worry about him defending his stance. There is no defense needed. He does not have to say that this was a joke gone wrong, or a comment that “just came out the wrong way.” We won’t have to endure apologies ad nauseam. We have blatant, in your face, disrespect and hatred for our Soldiers. It reminds me of when the effigy of an American Soldier was burned at Portland not long ago. It’s an aggressive stance that draws a very distinct line — the kind of line that can not be erased, moved or altered by double speak.

Maybe if his cartoon had some weird and twisted irony in it that were eluding to some truth or fact, I could stomach it better. The fact of the matter is there is no truth to what he says. He is illiberal and narrow minded where our military is concerned. His cartoons (past and present) are all the evidence we need to make such assertions. Let me give you a quick “snap shot” of the people who he said were stupid and poor (and a host of other things, but let’s focus on these two for now). The Heritage Foundation has done quite a wonderful job calling into question these assertions that are commonly stated by the anti-military faction.

I will just highlight a few of the findings here, for brevity sake. Please read the entire article found on their website. It is a very well conducted meta analysis of current demographics based on the measurable qualities of new recruits in today’s Armed Forces. The Heritage Foundation did not rely on unsubstantiated slander and hate mongering assertions to make their claims. They relied on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the information available. Enjoy:

October 27, 2006

Who Are the Recruits? The Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Military Enlistment, 2003–2005

by Tim Kane, Ph.D.

Center for Data Analysis Report #06-09

A pillar of conventional wisdom about the U.S. military is that the quality of volunteers has been degraded after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Examples of the voices making this claim range from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Daily News [1] to Michael Moore’s pseudo-documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. Some insist that minorities and the underprivileged are over­represented in the military. Others accuse the U.S. Army of accepting unqualified enlistees in a futile attempt to meet its recruiting goals in the midst of an unpopular war.[2]

A report published by The Heritage Foundation in November 2005 examined the issue and could not substantiate any degradation in troop quality by comparing military enlistees in 1999 to those in 2003. It is possible that troop quality did not degrade until after the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, when patriotism was high. A common assumption is that the Army experienced difficulty getting qualified enlistees in 2005 and was subse­quently forced to lower its standards. This report revisits the issue by examining the full recruiting classes for all branches of the U.S. military for every year from 2003 to 2005.

The current findings show that the demo­graphic characteristics of volunteers have contin­ued to show signs of higher, not lower, quality. Quality is a difficult concept to apply to soldiers, or to human beings in any context, and it should be understood here in context. Regardless of the standards used to screen applicants, the average quality of the people accepted into any organiza­tion can be assessed only by using measurable cri­teria, which surely fail to account for intangible characteristics. In the military, it is especially questionable to claim that measurable characteris­tics accurately reflect what really matters: cour­age, honor, integrity, loyalty, and leadership.

Although I totally agree that there is no way to claim that the measurable characteristics can reflect the level of courage, honor and integrity of a recruit I would also have to argue that much of an earlier, pre-training measure would be deeply confounded by training, fraternizing and bonding with fellow soldiers, as well as experience — especially experience on the battlefield. How can any of these characteristics be measured, other than to simply find a measure that would allow for a way to determine whether or not a recruit has the capacity to develop them and/or an ability to demonstrate these qualities within the setting of actual praxis? Courage in the classroom is very different than courage on the battlefield.

In summary, the additional years of recruit data (2004–2005) sup­port the previous finding that U.S. military recruits are more similar than dissimilar to the American youth population. The slight dif­ferences are that wartime U.S. mil­itary enlistees are better educated, wealthier, and more rural on aver­age than their civilian peers.

Recruits have a higher percent­age of high school graduates and representation from Southern and rural areas. No evidence indicates exploitation of racial minorities (either by race or by race-weighted ZIP code areas). Finally, the distri­bution of household income of recruits is noticeably higher than that of the entire youth population.

Demographic evidence discredits the argument that a draft is necessary to enforce representation from racial and socioeconomic groups. Addition­ally, three of the four branches of the armed forces met their recruiting goals in fiscal year 2005, and Army reenlistments are the highest in the past five years. A draft is not necessary to increase the size of the active-duty forces. Our analysis using Pentagon data on wartime volunteers effectively shatters the case for reinstating the draft.

As the article continues you will read that our troops are well educated (a better percentage than in the civilian world), and they come from many different socioeconomic backgrounds with the wealthier families being well represented. The quality of our troops today is something we should be proud of. This study clearly shows that today’s men and women in the Armed Services are smart and have many options to choose from when it comes to a career path. Yes, they are smart and they chose the military. The two are very compatible!

Here is the conclusion in the article:

As support for the war in Iraq has declined, criti­cism of the war has translated into criticism of our nation’s troops, at least by way of criticizing the quality of wartime recruits. The November 2005 Heritage Foundation study found that recruits enlisting at the start of the war were of high quality and in many respects comparable to the youth population. This updated report’s examination of three years of wartime recruits shows that recruit quality has not declined. The estimate for mean household income of recruits increased every year from 2003 through 2005. The poorest areas continue to be underrep­resented, while middle-class areas are overrepre­sented. Although the richest income brackets are underrepresented, the difference between the recruit and population proportions for these brack­ets is less than 0.25 percent. Overall, the distribu­tion for recruit household incomes is very similar to that of the youth population.

Another good resource: Official Debunks Myths About Military Recruits

Hooah!

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