The root of our future security problems grow deeper by the month. The present Administration continues to sabatouge our defenses for short term gains. A Los Angeles Times article breaks a growing issue of military readiness and quality into the mainstream . This is manifested in a suspicious increased promotion rate, an increase in retiring officers, veteran unemployment, healthcare administration for veterans, continued use of stop loss orders, and lest we forget increasing reliance on private firms for essential military services, skills, and knowledge. The President’s lack of attention to detail, or attention deficit disorder, will haunt the United States long after he leaves office.

A quote from James Fallows’s December article describes the overall trend:

"On the current course we will have two options," I was told by a
Marine lieutenant colonel who had recently served in Iraq and who
prefers to remain anonymous. "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army,
or we can just lose."

Mark Mazzetti in the LATimes wrote the "Army promoted 97% of all eligible captains to the rank of major… up from a historical average of 70% to 80%." Darwinian promotion process is being compromised to satisfy "requirements" by the re-organization.

A re-organization reliant on an increased promotion rate to the rank of lieutenant colonel from 65%-75% to 86% raises questions about the readiness of the officers themselves. The officer corps of the United States is second to none and is one of the pillars of our military strength. The increased rate bodes ill for the future as it comes at time when resignations are also much higher, likely accelerated by frequent OIF rotations and continued use of stop-loss orders. This trend itself is a clear indicator the military is near or at its limits.

The military is a knowledge-based organization. The knowledge of our soldiers, NCOs, officers, and generals is critical and core to the strength of armed forces. The professionalization of the American military, resulting from new technology and new threats, means it is less a citizen’s army than in the past, even during the Cold War. Ability and experience are tightly bound in the modern military, across the board from National Guard to Reserve to regular forces, from Marines to Air Force.

Unfortunately, the increased rate of promotion is a two-pronged hit. Besides lowering the standard of excellence, the experience gained and shared at the lower ranks is short-circuited.

Yet the increase in promotions is partly due to the large number of
Army officers choosing to leave the service. Army officers are getting
out of the military at the highest rate since the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks, shrinking the pool of officers eligible for
promotion.

According to Army data, the portion of junior officers
(lieutenants and captains) choosing to depart for civilian life rose
last year to 8.6%, up from 6.3% in 2004. The attrition rate for majors
rose to 7% last year, up from 6.4% in 2005. And the rate for lieutenant
colonels was 13.7%, the highest in more than a decade.

As a whole, retention figures for the Army cited by President Bush in a recent speech (and repeated in the State of the Union), ignores the reality:

Last year, the Army exceeded by 8% its overall goal for retaining
active-duty enlisted troops, a figure President Bush cited last week as
a sign of the service’s health.

Recruiting goals were "met" by lowering the monthly was a lowered bar and broader net.

such as accepting more high school dropouts and Category IV recruits —
those who score near the bottom of the military’s entrance exam.

The same is seen to be true for the officer corps:

"Basically, if you haven’t been court-martialed, you’re going to be promoted to major."

Mark Benjamin, writing at Salon.com, expands on this. The military is not only lowering the bar, promoting those who may not be capable or ready, but also issuing waivers to those that otherwise would be prohibited from joining due to criminal offenses.

The Army said that 17 percent (21,880 new soldiers) of its 2005 recruits were admitted under waivers. Put another way, more soldiers than are in an entire infantry division entered the Army in 2005 without meeting normal standards. This use of waivers represents a 42 percent increase since the pre-Iraq year of 2000. (All annual figures used in this article are based on the government’s fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. So fiscal year 2006 began Oct. 1, 2005.)

…Equally significant is the Army’s currently liberal use of "moral waivers," loosely defined as criminal offenses. Officially, the Pentagon states that most waivers issued on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets. Yet documents obtained by Salon show that many of the offenses are more serious and include drunken driving and domestic abuse.

Last year, 37 percent of the Army’s waivers (about 8,000 soldiers) were based on moral grounds. Like waivers as a whole, these waivers are proliferating — they’re 32 percent higher than in the prewar year of 2000. As a result, the odds are going up that the soldiers fighting and taking the casualties in Iraq entered the Army with a criminal record.

However, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismisses these reports, including a report by his own agency, responding the military was simply "battle-hardened" and as strong as ever. The disconnect between the military and civilian leadership has been written about here and elsewhere, and it will continue to be written about as the division becomes more pronounced and Grand Strategy is implemented on faulty notions of hard power by the Administration.

In a May/June 2005 article in Military Review, Professor Moskos noted the college students at Northwestern, asked in Oct 2004, were willing to serve as prison guards in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo if it meant loan forgiveness and additional money for education. Nearly 30% said they would consider or be "very likely" to accept the proposition. Is the military an institution of hallowed stories of the men who came before and simply an occupation to get in and get out?

This is a critical question as military missions expand into military operations other than war (MOOTW), such as "SysAdmin"-like functions integrated with civilian sector (public and private) state building enterprises (side note on terminology: you don’t "build a nation" with infrastructure assistance; building a nation comes from creating an identity, a "brand"). Increasing reliance on reserve components, National Guard, and other temporary resources impacts not only the readiness of the military in terms of training and availability, but also on local communities and economies.

At the peak last year, National Guard elements comprised nearly 50% of our forces in Afghanistan (remember that place?) and Iraq.