Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Does Obama include himself in the draft proposal?


"But it’s also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some."
Link

It's bad enough that the military has been forced to be a laboratory test tube for gender equality. Apparently he forgets that these young people have chosen to enlist, since we have an all volunteer, outstanding military. Young people in metropolitan areas have the same opportunity. And has he ever really looked at the data? Is he aware that rural schools have higher graduation rates than the city schools of Detroit or Cleveland or Columbus, and our military requires people of higher achievement? There are probably 25 year olds in the military who have more "leadership/executive" experience than he does. Does he know that the young people in the military are better educated and wealthier than a comparable group of young people in the civilian population? Or is he just again showing his elitist, liberal, smug opinion of people who choose to serve in the military, combined with his "clinging to guns and religion" bias toward fly-over country Americans.
    . . . each year shows advancement, not decline, in measurable qualities of new enlistees. For example, it is commonly claimed that the military relies on recruits from poorer neighborhoods because the wealthy will not risk death in war. Our review of Pen­tagon enlistee data shows that the only group that is lowering its participation in the military is the poor. The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population) declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005.

    . . . in the most recent edition of Population Representation in the Military Services, the Department of Defense reported that the mean reading level of 2004 recruits is a full grade level higher than that of the comparable youth population.[8] Fewer than 2 percent of wartime recruits have no high school creden­tials. Table 2 shows the breakdown for the educational attainment of the war­time recruit cohorts. The national high school graduation rate taken from the Census 2004 ACS is 79.8 percent." Link "Who are the recruits?"

2 comments:

R. L. said...

What he is saying is that he feels that youth in the urban centers should be pulling their weight in terms of joining as well. He was not putting down rural America, and he certainly was not putting down the people who already belong.

Quite the opposite.

Norma said...

Thanks for the clarification--he always seems to need someone, another liberal, to translate his words when he refers to anyone not of his class, education and stature.