Assalamu aleikum. >From the article below:
"THE US Army has fallen more than 8 per cent short of its recruitment goal for the year, army officials said ... The army is responding in part by increasing the percentage of prospective recruits with low scores on aptitude tests who would be eligible for service, officials said." - "One of the many fine things one has to admit is the way that the Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion, in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability." -Tom Lehrer, "It makes a fellow proud to be a soldier" --- US Army short on recruits >From correspondents in Washington Agence France-Presse October 04, 2005 http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16809321-23109,00.html THE US Army has fallen more than 8 per cent short of its recruitment goal for the year, army officials said. They acknowledged a setback for plans to enlarge a force strained by combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The army is responding in part by increasing the percentage of prospective recruits with low scores on aptitude tests who would be eligible for service, officials said. "It does have an impact," General Richard Cody, the army's vice chief of staff, said of the recruiting shortfall. General Cody said the army ended the 2005 fiscal year September 30 with a little more than 73,000 new recruits, well short of its goal of 80,000 new recruits. He said the shortfall means that the army would not be able to increase in size to 502,000 as planned, and instead would lag about 492,000 to 493,000. The increase was supposed to give the army a cushion as it buildt 10 new combat brigades and increased the size of its combat force by at least 30,000 troops from 315,000. General Cody said that even with the recruiting shortfall, the army remained on track to build those new brigades. But he said it would require moving more solders from the army bureaucracy into combat units, something that he said needed to be done anyway. "There are many things to deal with this end-strength issue," he said. "One of them is to rebalance what we have in the institutional army and continue to move military spaces and faces from that into the operational army." Army Secretary Frances Harvey said at a separate press conference that plans called for moving 40,000 soldiers from slots in the army bureaucracy or service schools to the operational units by 2007. On recruiting, the secretary said the army has decided to adopt Defence Department quality standards that were less demanding than those followed by the army. The army required that 67 per cent of its new recruits score in the top 50 percentile on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, while the Defence Department set a lower 60 per cent level for the services as a whole. "The truth of the matter is, we opened up the aperture and said, 'Okay, we can declare success as long as we stay above or at what DoD's goal was'," General Cody said, using the acronym for the Department of Defence. "That's to afford the recruiters out there a wider aperture to go after." General Cody said the army met its quality goals this year, and he insisted that maintaining the quality of the force remained a top priority. "We are not going to lower our standards," he said. "We have a certain percentage that we will not go below for non-high school diplomas. We closed out the year meeting all the floors we wanted to meet in terms of quality." http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16809321-23109,00.html ------------------------ Yahoo! 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