Thursday, February 07, 2008

A Subprime Military

Iraq has been hurting military recruitment in the United States:
The DoD classifies military recruits according to educational attainment in 'tiers.' Tier 1 recruits are those with at least a regular high school diploma. The proportion of active-duty Army recruits in tier 1 has dropped from 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent in 2007. While the benchmark of 90 percent was also missed in 2005, the percentages have not been this low for at least 20 years. (National Priorities Project, "Military Recruiting 2007: Army Misses Benchmarks by Greater Margin")
Black military recruitment went down first, but the rest of America has by now also wised up, forcing the armed forces to increasingly turn to subprime recruits.

That is good news for people in the Third World, but unfortunately subprime recruits are renewable resources, given the way the American class system is set up to fail children at education.

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