The Army can't meet its recruiting goals, drops high school diploma/GED requirement
/The few, the proud to be gay, the well-heeled
The U.S. Army announced on Thursday it is removing its requirement for potential recruits to have a high school diploma or GED certificate to enlist, in an effort to improve recruiting numbers.
The Army has met only 40 percent of its recruiting goals this year, Military.com reports:
[T]he service announced that individuals may enlist without those previously required education certifications if they ship to basic training this fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1.
Recruits must also be at least 18 years old and otherwise qualify for a job in the active-duty Army. They also must score at least a 50 on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, an SAT-style quiz to measure a potential recruit's academic ability.
A 50 on the test is a relatively low score, with 31 being the minimum to qualify for service.
The Army's "sister services" seem to have a similar issue with low recruiting numbers "hitting the entire Defense Department," according to Military.com.
Even McDonald’s can’t find workers, so I think the linked-to article’s claim that the Army recruiters’ mission fail is due to rainbow flags and mandatory sensitivity sessions is incomplete. Certainly, losing the macho, big-guns-that-go-pow promises of fun isn’t helping, but neither is the loss of what used to steer many young men to the military: patriotism.
I’ve mentioned this here from the time time but again, once you’ve convinced an entire generation that their country was founded on slavery, has no values worth keeping, and continues to be a vile, oppressive state, why would you expect a kid to volunteer to protect, fight, and die for it? You wouldn’t of course, and neither do the people running this program.
We’ll get along just fine with robots behind our drive-in windows, but we won’t survive a decimated military, and that’s by design.