BUZZ FLASH EXCLUSIVE: MILITARY REPEATEDLY FAILS TO MEET RECRUITMENT GOALS, BUT DOD COOKS THE BOOKS

Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
http://www.buzzflash.com/

By Paul Sullivan

On December 28, the Christian Science Monitor published an op-ed that was misleading – to the point of being pure propaganda. The lead sentence is so far from reality that I stayed late at the office on New Year’s Eve to kill this myth dreamed up by someone who must read military press releases and then regurgitate them whole.

The CSM column by Jamie Holmes falsely claimed that, "For the first time since the establishment of all-volunteer forces in 1973, the US military has met all of its recruiting goals." Not only is this wrong, it ignores a mountain of evidence clearly available in the press showing the military remains in crisis.

In reality, the military failed to reach new enlistment goals for the past decade. The military accomplished this by manipulating, and thereby significantly lowering, the number of new recruits needed to fill the ranks. The military accomplished this voodoo bookkeeping by relying upon more than 500,000 individual National Guard and Reserve service members to fill recruiting shortages.

The true number is even higher because many Guard and Reserve activated and deployed twice or more.

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