Abused By Illusions

Could it possibly be that the reason this administration seems to be hell bent on crashing the economy is that they know they are gonna need a huge amount of cannon fodder for the "Grand Chessboard?" The following article sure seems to lead me to believe as much.

C.I. Abramson

Recruiting At Any Cost
How The Pentagon Keeps The New Recruits Coming

by Natasha Saulnier

With the number of American casualties in Iraq increasing daily for a war that now even Sec. of State Colin Powell believes is lost, it may come as a surprise that recruitment rates are still up. The Pentagon reports that for the year 2004, its 15,000 recruiters have already recruited over 212,000 people, surpassing its goal of 210,000, at a cost of $ 14,000 per recruit, and Marine Staff Sergeant Mark Ayalin at Quantico Recruiting Command confirms, “Recruitment figures haven't been affected by the situation in Iraq at all.”

This triumphant stance conceals a more grim reality. In its 2003 Government Accounting Office (GAO) Report, the Pentagon stated that “convincing young adults to join the military has become more difficult.” At the same time, the Department of Defense’s budget for recruiting reached a record $4 billion for the fiscal year 2003 according to a Government Accounting Office report, and the portion of that budget devoted to advertising nearly doubled in the past five years, from $299 million in 1998 to $592 million in 2003. In the same period, the Army alone increased its advertising spending by 73 percent to $197 million, and the Air Force the same budget by 395 percent to $90.5 million. The advertising cost per new enlisted recruit has nearly tripled from $640 in 1990 to almost $1,900 last year.

A 1996 Navy Recruiting Command study admits “In our analysis, family incomes proved to be the most important economic variable … Enlistment rates are much higher when income is lowest and college enrollment rates are low.” And, unsurprisingly, as Michael Moore points out in his film Fahrenheit 9/11, recruiters target 17 or 18 year-olds desperate to escape the lower classes. “Economic conscription is easier when the economy gets bad. Recruiters often amplify the bad economic conditions and present themselves as the only strategy," explained counter recruiter and former publisher of AWOL magazine Mario Hardy.

The No Child Left Behind Act, enacted in 2001, and the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year of 2002 have made economic conscription much easier. They require every high school receiving federal education funds to hand over the names, addresses and phone numbers of every junior and senior to local military recruitment officers



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