samclem said:
Can you imagine starting Basic Training at 42 years old? I guess this could be a money-saver for Uncle Sam--the guy/gal draws a pension for 20 fewer years and the retiree will be eligible for Medicare 3 years or less after retiring.
The maximum age for military active duty is 62. (The waiver literally requires an act of Congress. Rickover & Hopper knew a lot of Congressmen but Rickover literally outlived his support.) So the current age 42 cutoff is to comply with Title X legislative entitlement to an opportunity to become eligible for an active-duty retirement. If the age 62 retirement is raised (as Rumfeld desires) then recruits could get even older.
Let's not forget all the Reservists in their 50s! There are grandparents on active duty in the desert troubleshooting logistics problems. I know a Navy O-5, a former Vietnam corpsman with three Purple Hearts (and a bunch of grateful Marines), who's pushing physically training his fellow Reservists through Fort Bragg enroute desert points east. He's 59, he has to demob before he turns 60, and I think he's given max value for your tax dollars.
samclem said:
Still, lowering the bar in all these areas is going to haunt the Army long after the present situation ends.
Leonidas said:
A few older soldiers won't hurt the army - but I would worry about the effects of lowered educational standards. Today's military is much better trained, lead and motivated than what we had after Vietnam that they can probably expand the recruiting pool without too much harm - provided that they are rigorous in eliminating anyone who doesn't measure up to standards in training, performance and discipline. In those areas there should be no lowerng of standards.
I wasn't there but I've read that by late Vietnam the Marines had admitted over a quarter of their recruits in Category IV, the most undesirable. (God only knows what the Army did with the guys who not even the Marines wanted.) By the end of WWII over 10% of the recruits were being treated for active venereal diseases-- and these were just the recruits, folks.
I think today's marginal performers who slip through the recruiting process are still pretty much weeded out by the training commands-- especially the training commands staffed by vets who got shot up in a war zone. When I was at a training command, if we felt that someone deserved a failing grade then our chain of command backed us up-- subject, of course, to our remedial training plan for fixing the problem. And on submarines the marginal unmotivated performers are weeded out by their shipmates via a vicious Darwinian process of mutual humiliation. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same in an Army platoon.
The recruiting statistics of "no high school diploma" also lump in all the homeschoolers who've taken the GED. The military is hot for homeschoolers these days because they're an overlooked demographic of frequently very bright & talented people... but they're still counted as "no high school diploma". And even in the '90s, after a decade of "Not in my Navy!", it was almost guaranteed that my best, brightest, & most inquisitive shipmates also possessed a waiver for pre-service marijuana use.
Leonidas said:
Maybe Nords can comment on this aspect: The Eisenhower is relieving the Enterprise, which has been deployed since May and is due back home in November. Enterprise has been working its butt off, supporting missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan and has been without a port call for more than 150 days. The aircraft flying missions into Afghanistan have to fly as much as 1,000 miles per mission - sometimes requiring three refuelings to stay aloft. Pilots are reporting flying as much as 100 hours per month. All of that has to take a toll.
Why, you're describing the world's most capable, proficient, & experienced warriors! Why would we want to pull them back home just when they've achieved their peak performance? These top-of-their-game folks are the same pilots who last year were whining about not getting enough fuel for their training flights-- and now they're complaining again?!? They must be happy because their retention is at an all-time high!
Oh, you mean the toll on the
families. Ahem.
But, no, the battlegroup will be back in homeport by day 180. It might be sundown on day 180 but they'll have the lines over before midnight.
Leonidas said:
Is it possible that the Eisenhower deployment was moved up a few weeks to the Enterprise people could get their relief a little early in light of what they've been doing for almost six months?
I don't get to see the schedules any more, but even if it's possible it's unlikely. Getting a battlegroup ready to deploy is a chaotic three-ring circus of football-frolicking monkeys who don't appear to have any brains, time, spare parts, or funds. Usually the critique of the graduation exercise reads something like "These guys suck but at least they didn't run aground or shoot down any allied aircraft, although if we didn't need them so badly over there..." And that's what the O-6s are saying to the flag officers. I can only imagine what it's like in the Chief's mess.
Usually the next deployer is sucking down all the contingency funds, blasting the logistics "system procedures" to smithereens, stripping the spare parts (even some of the operational parts) from the rest of the squadron, pirating the squadron's best people, blackmailing inviting the training commands to send a few instructors along on TAD orders, leaning on all the assignment officers for their prospective gains to report in before they get underway, involuntarily mobilizing every Reservist they can get their hands on, and generally burning every bridge they can't blow up in an effort to achieve maximum readiness potential before they leave town. In their shoes I'd do the same. However many military inquiries & courts martial have established the precedent that the boss doesn't want to send an undertrained battlegroup into a combat zone (think USS VINCENNES vs the Airbus) a minute sooner than scheduled-- no matter how "tired" the incumbents are.
Any Navy deployment over 180 days requires CNO approval-- and today's answer is a preformatted "#$%^ no" delivered in the requestor's fitness report. Portcalls, however, are widely perceived by cynics (me included) to be a lure designed to keep the crew from deserting before the deployment. ("Australia? Kewl, I'll be there!!") I've had more canceled portcalls than approved ones, and the only time our liberty request was approved turned out to be Subic Bay in time for the Mount Pinatubo eruption.
The first couple years of retirement I cheerfully waved bye-bye to every submarine heading down the channel. Nowadays, though, every once in a while I feel a twinge of envy at the thing they're going to be doing and the achievements they'll rack up. But after a frosty beverage and a trip down Memory Lane that twinge is usually gone by the time I wake up from my nap...
Tonight we're going to the wetting down of a Reservist who made O-6 on his fifth try. (That's about as likely as hitting the same Vegas roulette number three times in a row.) He's an explosive ordnance disposal expert who, in his civilian life, has been cleaning up Kaho`olawe. He's taking this promotion fully expecting to be mobilized for at least two of the next two years, and there aren't any 180-day limits on Reservists in the desert. But he's renting the Hickam AFB oceanside Marina Restaurant for three hours of open bar & pupus, just him and 60 or 70 shipmates, and even his parents & grown kids have flown in from the Mainland. He's 56 years old but he wouldn't have this turn out any other way.