The "ideal state" of Army recruitment
Today's Chronicle editorial on Army recruitment is more puzzling than the usual fare.
The idealists suggest that highlighting various incentives is a misleading form of recruiting by the U.S. armed forces:
The new ads, however, might confuse some parents with their suggestions that the Army is primarily a job training program, a tuition source or, most worrisome, some kind of personal development retreat. Parents can succumb to wishful thinking when it comes to opportunities for their children. At a time when most recruits are destined for combat, this TV campaign may offer a perilously skewed view of what military service entails.
But the editorial concludes as follows:
In addition to its TV ads, the Army has taken proposed substantive steps to boost recruitment: greatly increasing financial incentives, offering down payments on homes and raising the maximum recruitment age to 42. These straightforward measures would do far more to prompt realistic decision-making than ads promoting wartime military service as a path to self-actualization.
So, some inducements to serve (job training, tuition) are worthy of disparagement from the editorial elitists down at 801 Texas Avenue, but others (financial incentives, down payments on homes) are "straightforward measures" that somehow relieve the original concern of the editorialists (that being the ridiculous assertion that recruits somehow don't understand that soldiers sometimes fight wars, and wars can be deadly)?
Seriously, a down payment on a house makes it more clear for the Chronicle editorial elitists that war can be deadly?
Does anybody at the Chronicle even read some of these editorials before they go to print?
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 08/21/05 09:40 PM | Print |
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