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Plenty of Warriors, Not Enough Clerks
June 13, 2005: The U.S. Army continues to have problem attracting recruits for its non-combat jobs. All the other services are exceeding their recruiting goals this year, but the army is coming up short. The current fiscal year is eight months gone, and the army is 17 percent short of its annual recruiting goals. But all the other services met or exceeded their goals, putting overall recruiting short eight percent. That's some 8,000 troops, in a force of 1.4 million. The reserves are doing better, with an overall shortfall of a few thousand recruits in a force of 1.2 million.In May, the army was 25 percent short in recruits for the active force, and has been short just about every month since January. There's no shortage of warriors, it's the 85 percent of the jobs that involved clerical or maintenance tasks that not enough people want. The marines, which put their "combat" role up front when recruiting, are getting all the people they need. Despite the fact that the marines have a higher casualty rate than the army in Iraq, marine recruiters challenge potential recruits to find out if they are good enough to be a marine. But the army has long stressed the "career" aspects of army service. This made sense, as only about 15 percent of army jobs involve combat. Since the 1970s, somewhat to the army's surprise, there has never been a shortage of recruits for these dangerous jobs. And until recently, there were plenty of recruits for the non-combat jobs. But when Iraq was invaded in 2003, and non-combat troops were attacked frequently, the word got around. Parents, and many of the recruits, no longer saw the army as a safe place to go for a few years, to learn skills, get education benefits, and some good stuff to put on the resume. While casualties are low in Iraq, the lowest the army has ever suffered in wartime, a disproportionate number of the killed and wounded are non-combat troops. Decades of army recruiting, and training, that played down the danger angle for non-combat troops. This has now become a major recruiting problem. While the army never hid the fact that everyone in the army was, well, in a combat organization, the training and leadership over the last two decades has played down the possibility of combat, and combat injuries, for non-combat troops. As a result, the potential recruits feel, well, deceived. It's, like," "hey, dude, you didn't saying anything about getting shot or blown up." The army has added to the shock by hastily revising training for combat support troops. Now non-combat troops get the kind of intense combat training they have not received for over a decade. Back in the early 1990s, the army created a separate basic training systems for combat troops, because political pressure forced them to mix male and female recruits in basic training units. Since the women could not keep up with the men in the standard, very intense, basic, the "non-combat basic" was toned down so the female recruits could handle it. This change has gone unnoticed outside the army, but NCOs and officers know the problem well. The discipline of non-combat troops declined after basic training was watered down. It became pretty easy to tell the difference between combat and non-combat troops, even when they were out of uniform. The combat troops carried themselves like soldiers, while many of the non-combat types appeared to be civilians in uniform. This became a serious problem when many non-combat troops got shot at in 2003, and their lack of discipline and preparation for combat made them more likely to get hurt. The army is not having any problems getting current troops to stay in, and plans to solve the recruiting problem by keeping the more intense training for non-combat troops, and offering more financial incentives for specific skills it is looking for. Army recruiting ads now stress the fact that we're at war, and its dangerous out there. More non-combat jobs will be replaced with civilians, and, slowly, the army will retool its image to the way it used to be. The new doctrine is that everyone in the army is a soldier, and everyone must be ready to deal with combat. Eventually, army recruiters will have the same kind of success the marines currently have. The marines have always made it clear that every marine must be ready for combat at all times. Posted by: Steve 2005-06-13 |
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