The Army is grappling with a staggering attrition rate among newly enlisted troops, even as recent recruiting figures suggest the service is clawing its way out of a yearslong enlistment crisis.
Nearly one-quarter of soldiers recruited since 2022 have failed to complete their initial contracts, according to internal Army data reviewed by Military.com. While the Army's recruiting totals look solid on paper, a high dropout rate raises serious doubts about whether those numbers are an accurate portrayal of how well the service is manned.
It remains unclear why the Army is losing so many soldiers, but one explanation could be the declining quality of its recruiting pool. One-quarter of all enlistees last year had to go through at least one of the Future Soldier Preparatory Courses, which were set up as a sort of silver bullet for recruiting woes -- getting applicants up to snuff with academic or body fat enlistment standards before they ship out to basic training.
Donald Trump’s dismantling of the deep state presages the formation of something far worse.
Feb. 18, 2025 / Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report - The Trump administration’s war with the deep state is not a purgative. It is not about freeing us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or the end of mass surveillance. It will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. It will not slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.
All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures. The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power. It is a coup d'état by inches. Now we get our own.
Rearguard battles — as in the early years of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany — are taking place in the courts and media outlets openly hostile to Trump. There will be, at first, pyrrhic victories — the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were stalled by their own judiciaries and hostile press — but gradually the purges, aided by a bankrupt liberalism that no longer stands or fights for anything, ensures the triumph of the new masters.
The Trump administration has expelled or fired officials who investigate wrongdoing within the federal government, including 17 inspectors general. Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and Homeland Security, are being purged of those deemed hostile to Trump. Courts, as they are stacked with compliant judges, will be mechanisms for the persecution of state “enemies” and protection rackets for the powerful and the rich. The Supreme Court, which has granted Trump legal immunity, has already reached this stage.
December 11, 2024 / Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs / Media CenterPress Releases - Rep. Sara Jacobs (CA-51) released the following statement after voting against the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included a gender-affirming care ban for dependents. If passed into law, this would mark the first time that Congress put anti-LGBTQ+ provisions into statute since Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s. This year’s NDAA also failed to include Rep. Jacobs’ bipartisan and bicameral provision to expand TRICARE coverage of IVF and other assisted reproductive technology to service members and their spouses.
September 30, 2024 / William Hartung / Tom Dispatch - The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.
Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.
And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.
October 11, 2024 / Edward Hasbrouck / Antiwar.com - Of men in the U.S. who turned 18 in 2023, fewer than 40% signed up for the draft – down from more than 60% in 2020 before the start of the war in Ukraine.
The SSS maintains a database of eligible male U.S. citizens and residents who could be conscripted if and when Congress and the President institute a draft. Per the law, American males must register within 30 days of their 18th birthday or find it difficult to get a drivers license in some states.
CNAS and War on the Rocks like to describe themselves as “realists”. But their arguments for stepped-up planning and preparation for a draft are strikingly unrealistic, in at least four respects.
First, Sylvester and Kuzminski – like the Selective Service System and the Department of Justice – entirely ignore whether, much less how or at what cost, a draft could be enforced.
The practical difficulty of enforcing a draft in the face of widespread evasion and resistance was the Achilles heel of the last U.S. draft, and has to be central to any realistic plan for a future draft.
You can’t just wave a magic cheerleader’s baton and get every would-be draftee, male or female, to march down to the induction office to ship out for Taiwan, Ukraine, Palestine, or points unknown. Like it or not, many young people won’t go voluntarily. If they would, a draft wouldn’t be needed.
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NNOMYnews reports on the growing intrusions by the Department of Defense into our public schools in a campaign to normalize perpetual wars with our youth and to promote the recruitment efforts of the Pentagon.
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