The Case for Professionalizing the U.S. Military

The number of new U.S. Army recruits who are high-school dropouts soared during the Bush years, peaking at 29.3 percent in 2007. The economic collapse made life easier for military recruiters. “Only” 17 percent of soldiers who joined in 2008 failed to graduate from high school. But high unemployment hasn’t resulted in enough new high-quality soldiers and sailors.

Recruit quality is important. Uneducated or incapable soldiers are less likely to do well operating high-tech equipment. And they’re more likely to do stupid things, like beating up, robbing and raping civilians in U.S.-occupied territories.

The U.S. military is bigger than ever. But it’s becoming dumber. It’s also getting meaner: in 2008 one in five recruits received a “morals waiver” because they had a criminal record, including felonies. “The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous ‘operations tempo’—soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty, with no end in sight,” reported Slate’s Fred Kaplan in 2008.

As if that weren’t bad enough, America’s armed services are losing their smartest officers faster than ever. After graduating from West Point, cadets must serve five years. More high-caliber officers are choosing not to reenlist than at any time since the Vietnam War: 44 percent in 2006, up from 18 percent in 2003. Some analysts blame the endless wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.

There isn’t much glory in shooting up buses and taxis at checkpoints in the hot dust of Central Asia and the Middle East. And it doesn’t help that, yellow-ribbon magnets aside, the United States of America doesn’t give a damn about its veterans. Whereas other countries treat their warriors like heroes, providing them with free housing and other benefits, the U.S. uses up and discards them like tissue paper. “Veterans make up almost a quarter of the homeless population in the United States,” reports CNN. “The government says there are as many as 200,000 homeless veterans; the majority served in the Vietnam War. Some served in Korea or even World War II. About 2,000 served in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Higher salaries would increase the military’s applicant pool and thus the quality and quantity of enlistees. But no one ever talks about the most obvious way to professionalize the U.S. military: treat servicemen and servicewomen like professionals.

Consider my experience.

Motivated by curiosity, contrarian rebellion and the loss of my full scholarship due to the Reagan budget cuts, I went down to my local Army recruiting station during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I thought perhaps there was some way to finance the remainder of my education by doing military service. The recruiter set up an appointment for me to take an aptitude test.

Then the phone calls began. They were excited. Apparently I had gotten a perfect score. This didn’t happen often.

Which didn’t surprise me. Two things leapt out at me when I took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. First: it was appallingly easy. I was an AP student; I hadn’t seen material so simple since elementary school. Second: the other guys taking the test were dolts. Where did they find such losers? Even my school’s shop classes didn’t feature such a sad collection of yahoos, misfits and morons.

Allowing for the obvious seduce-and-destroy tactics of Army recruiters, I did believe that they wanted me more than the average schlub who took the ASVAB. I was a straight-A student. All my test scores were in the top percentile, including a perfect score on the math SAT. I’d gotten into Columbia University’s engineering program. I knew I was a catch.

I went in to talk.

One recruiter handed me a brochure. One of the photos showed a German village. “You’ll probably be sent to Germany,” he said. Probably.

“Can you put that in writing?”

Of course not. You go where they send you. That’s the Army way. The military way. But look at it from the viewpoint of an 18-year-old. I had options! I could stay in school, take out student loans, earn a degree and get recruited by some deep-pocketed defense contractor. A deep-pocketed defense contractor that couldn’t make me pack up and ship off to, say, Afghanistan or Iraq. A deep-pocketed defense contractor whose job I could quit just like that.

I was drawing cartoons and doing reporting for my campus newspaper.

“You’ll almost certainly end up as a military journalist,” the other recruiter said. “Stars and Stripes. Would you like that?”

Well, shucks and golly gee, why not? I’d be another Bill Mauldin! “Will you guarantee that?” I asked.

Nope. You do what they assign you to do. Where they tell you to do it. For as long as they want you to do it.

“Can I put in a request for the kind of job I’d prefer?” I asked. “Or for where I’d like to be stationed?”

There was a pause. The two men glanced at each other. I noticed a smirk, ever so slight, on one of their faces. As I knew it would be, the answer was a lie:

“Well, um, sure, I suppose we could submit your preferences,” the liar-recruiter lied.

“No reason why not,” the other one chimed in.

They only had one real carrot: the college tuition program. I was looking at paying $13,000 a year in tuition and fees. They were offering $4,000 a year for one term of enlistment. Actually, “up to $4,000.”

If the military wants to attract smart young men and women like I used to be, with high test scores and clean criminal records, they’re going to have to start treating recruits like employees, not slaves or indentured servants. Fix enlistment terms, abolish both the current “stop-loss” rule scheduled to end next year and commit never to start a new one. Let people choose their jobs. (They can request one now. That’s not enough.) Let people decide where they want to serve. If a brilliant recruit doesn’t want to go to Afghanistan, why not let her serve elsewhere? The intelligent, independent thinkers a 21st century military needs demand and deserve the same respect they would enjoy in the private sector.

What about war? Shouldn’t a president be able to send troops wherever he wants, consent be damned?

No.

When the public supports a war, there are plenty of volunteers and enlisted men and women ready to go and fight. If there aren’t enough people willing to go, there isn’t enough political will to win. No one should be asked to fight—or die—for a cause they don’t believe in.

(Ted Rall is working on a radical political manifesto for publication this fall. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Anatomy of a Corporate Layoff

One year ago, I was fired.

Not laid off—fired. In a layoff, you go home until the factory calls you back to work. I got fired.

Everyone knew there would be a bloodbath. Management tried to keep it secret. But we knew.

Human resources experts say mass firings should take place on a Friday. Worker bees are used to going home for the weekend. Duh.

Mine took place on a Thursday. Which was my fault. A couple of weeks earlier, when management still believed that their Big Layoff was a big secret, I had told my boss I wanted that Friday off. They rescheduled the firings for me. To my erstwhile coworkers: sorry about harshing your Friday.

When it came, I knew there was a good chance I’d be on the death list. It wasn’t rocket science: my boss didn’t like me. “Painful as it may be, a layoff is a good time to terminate marginal employees,” wrote Guy Kawasaki in “The Art of the Layoff.” Painful for the employee. Fun for the boss. “Marginal” is corporatese for “disliked by one’s boss.”

I worked three days a week for a company called United Media, which syndicates comic strips like “Dilbert” and “Peanuts” to newspapers. It is owned by E.W. Scripps, a media conglomerate based in Cincinnati. My title was editor of acquisitions and development. I was a talent scout: I recruited cartoonists and writers, worked with them to craft their features into saleable features, then edited them after they launched. It was fun. It was also hard. On several occasions, I was pressed to do things I thought were unethical, things that screwed cartoonists and writers. As a cartoonist and writer myself, I refused.

My reviews were mostly positive. But I was given two bits of negative feedback: I didn’t seem to care about filling out forms. (There were a lot of forms.) And I sided with the “talent” rather than the company.

I began to suspect the axe was going to fall months before it did, when Lisa—Lisa was my boss—dithered about, then refused to approve, my travel to the 2009 San Diego Comicon. Sure, times were tight, especially in the media business. But I’d gone in 2007 and 2008. And other execs were getting their travel approved. Lisa went to Germany for a book fair. Hm.

Lisa harassed me relentlessly. She gave me impossible tasks with no chance of success: “Develop a turnkey solution for newspaper websites.” Citing the flimsiest of excuses, she canceled projects she had previously green-lighted. I was an executive; she assigned me to menial tasks previously left to junior editors. She insulted me during staff meetings. “Why don’t you do your job, Ted? For once?”

In retrospect I realize she had just given up trying to goad me into quitting.

Sitting fake-casually on the big red sofas by the “Peanuts” ephemera in the lobby that Thursday morning were two huge goons. Each wore those nametags you get when you visit an office. Subtle.

I closed my office door and called a friend to discuss my sense of impending doom. “I’ve been through it six times,” he told me. “Here’s how it’ll happen. Lisa will ask you: ‘Can you step in for a minute?’ You’ll go in. Someone from HR will be there.”

I hung up. I worked on a memo about how the company should adapt to the changing syndication market by offering marketing and management services to freelance, non-syndicated cartoonists and other content providers. I cc-ed my fellow execs, most of whom already knew what I was about to learn. Send. A half-hour passed. No replies. The phone rang. It was Lisa. “Ted? Can you step in for a minute?” she asked. I walked down the hall, turned left and walked into her office. Carol from HR was sitting under the stuffed Dilbert.

“As you know, the blah blah problems in the business blah blah position is being eliminated blah blah blah not acquiring new properties blah there’s a meeting at 11 for everyone who’s being reduced blah blah blah blah blah—”

“Reduced”?

You’ve heard the euphemisms: Downsizing. Rightsizing. Me, I was part of a “reduction in force.”

I had been fired from other jobs. I got fired when I was younger and even snottier than I am now. I came late, left early, took long lunches. “Get the hell out of here!” my boss at the local supermarket yelled at my bratty 17-year-old self. “You’re worthless! A slacker!” I didn’t argue. He was right.

But I had never been “laid off.”

They say getting laid off is better than being “fired for cause.” You qualify for unemployment benefits. It looks better to future prospective employers (ha! as though those still existed). Getting laid off isn’t personal.

For me, that was the problem.

True, if there’s anything worse than having to have a job, it’s losing one. Once you’re on the way out the door, the details of how it goes down don’t really matter. You don’t know how you’re going to pay your bills. Will you lose your home? Will you end up living in your car? Those are the big questions.

Somehow, though, how they do it—how they fire you—matters.

I prefer the personal approach.

If there’s a moment that calls for honesty, it’s firing someone. If Lisa had called me into her office and told me: “Ted, it’s like this: I don’t like you. I can’t work with someone I don’t like. I used to trust you and your judgment, I used to appreciate what you did, but I’ve changed my mind. It’s over. You’re fired. Go home,” I still would still have had that hole-in-your-stomach feeling for the next few months. But I would have respected her.

It would have been personal. Honest.

Instead, I got Carol from HR.

It wasn’t Carol-from-HR’s fault. She did what she was told to do, no doubt by someone in Cincinnati who had never so much as laid eyes on me or the other seven people sitting around the table in the conference room, staring at the thick pile of documents in the E.W. Scripps folder she had handed us. Elsewhere, at other Scripps-owned companies around the country, similar meetings were being held. I wondered: were they simultaneous? You know, to allow for different time zones?

Scripps is a cheap company. The previous year, a perfect employee evaluation earned a Scripps worker a four-percent raise. Next came a pay freeze, and with it a lie: a pledge not to lay anyone off. The severance offer was consistent with their previous tightwaddery: four weeks pay.

Whatever.

“The sooner you get the severance agreement signed and sent to me,” Carol repeated, “the sooner you’ll get paid.” I flipped through the lengthy document. There was no way I could sign it. Among the provisions: I could never work for another media company the rest of my life.

If I’d signed it, writing this column would be a breach of contract.

For a lousy four weeks of severance.

There was a deadline by which to sign. As it approached, Carol emailed me. We talked on the phone, and again when I came into the office to pick up my personal items. I told her about the media company provision. Would they delete it? “It’s a reduction of force,” she replied. “We can’t change it.”

I had discussed it with several lawyers. One said it was so breathtakingly overreaching that no judge would enforce it in a court of law. “But a ‘reduction of force’ isn’t a legal term,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. You can delete that section if you want to.”

She refused.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “we wouldn’t enforce that part.” Sure.

She seemed surprised that I didn’t trust them.

Six months later, Scripps bought the Travel Channel for $181 million.

(Ted Rall is working on a radical political manifesto for publication this fall. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Obama Revives Clinton’s Disastrous Triangulation Strategy

“It was Bill Clinton who recognized that the categories of conservative and liberal played to Republican advantage and were inadequate to address our problems,” President Obama wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope. “Clinton’s third way…tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of Americans.”

Clinton’s “third way” was “triangulation,” a term and strategy invented by his pollster Dick Morris. Triangulation is a candidate’s attempt to position himself above and between the left and the right. A Democrat, Clinton insulated himself from Republican attacks by appropriating many of their ideas.

Obama is even more of a triangulator than Clinton.

Triangulation can work for candidates in the short term. Clinton got reelected by a landslide in 1996. (It failed, though, for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004.) But triangulation hurts parties, which sell an ideological point of view. Clinton worked so hard to out-Republican the Republicans that he forgot he was a Democrat-. He also forgot that Democratic voters expected to see liberal policies.

Clinton’s greatest achievements ended up being Republican platform planks: free trade deals like NAFTA and the WTO, welfare reform, balancing the federal budget on the backs of the poor and working class.

By the way, Dick Morris is now a Republican. Maybe he always was.

Because of Clintonian triangulation, the liberal base of the Democratic Party saw the 1990s as a squandered opportunity: eight years of unprecedented economic expansion with not one new social program, not even national healthcare, to show for it. They got the message: voting Democratic doesn’t guarantee Democratic policies. Unenthused, liberals stayed home or voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Liberal disgust for triangulation (they called it “selling out”) sufficiently reduced Al Gore’s margin of victory to allow George W. Bush to steal Florida and the national election. It took the Democrats six years to begin to recover.

Obama ran as a centrist. It would come as little surprise if he were governing as one.

But he’s not a moderate president.

Obama is a Republican.

A right-wing Republican. Thanks to triangulation gone wild.

In his first year Obama chose to continue numerous Bush Administration policies, many of which originated in the far extreme wing of the GOP. Each of the following asterisks represents a broken campaign promise:

Keeping the Guantánamo torture camp open*

Continuing the war against Iraq*

Expanding the war against Afghanistan

Renewing the USA Patriot Act*

No-string bank bailouts

Continuing “military commission” kangaroo trials*

Reserving the right to torture*

Continuing the NSA’s “domestic surveillance” program of spying on innocent Americans’ emails and phone calls*

It took over a year, but Obama can finally point to two legislative achievements: healthcare reform and reducing private banks’ role in the issuance of student loans. The student loan bill, though a step in the right direction, is liberal but too modest. Student loans ought to be replaced by grants. Ultimately, universities and colleges will have to be nationalized.
Obama’s revamp of healthcare, on the other hand, goes too far, perverting the liberal desire to provide healthcare for all Americans into a transfer of wealth from poor to rich that the hard right never dreamed of.

Buying into the classic, flawed, American assumption that a bad system can’t get worse (ask the Iraqis and Afghans), ObamaCare entrusts 30 million new customers, to the tune of roughly ten grand a year each, to the tender mercies of private insurance companies.

ObamaCare pours hundreds of billions of dollars, some from taxpayers, the rest from poor people, into the gaping coffers of giant corporations. Once people find themselves paying even more for visits to the same crappy doctors and hospitals they can’t afford now, they’ll hold the Dems responsible at the polls. If Republicans stopped to think, they’d love it.

And if Democrats stopped to think, they’d hate it.

Most Americans, and almost all liberal Democrats, want socialized medicine. Like they have in the rest of the world. Failing that, they were willing to settle for single-payer. When Obama let it be known that Mr. Audacity was going to lead as anything but, they prayed for a “public option.” What they got: zero.

Actually, less than zero: We were better off before. Taxes will go up for the already insured. For those about to be forcibly insured, they’ll have to pay more. And here’s the kicker: not only will the insurance companies be making higher profits at our expense, so will the federal government.

The Congressional Budget Office, invariably described in pieces like this as “the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office,” projects that the U.S. Treasury will come out ahead by $130 billion over 10 years.

Deficit negativity helped score votes among Democratic deficit hawks in Congress. But again, think about it: If the healthcare bill is making a profit for the U.S. government, where is that $130 billion coming from?

Correct: you and me. Our taxes will be higher than they should be, our health benefits will be less.

Obama, the media and many of us have forgotten what the problem was in the first place. Healthcare costs were too high. Thanks to this monster of a bill, they’ll go even higher.

The government should not make a profit off sick people.

Even the Republicans wouldn’t propose a tax this regressive.

Now Obama is echoing Sarah Palin, right-winger-turned-Tea-Partier. “Drill, baby, drill!” says the president, guaranteeing oil-soaked beaches decades after he has retired. It’s a terrible policy for the environment, won’t lower gas prices by one red penny, and will further turn off liberal Democrats.

Democrats will lose seats in Congress this fall. It may already be too late for Democrats to keep the White House in 2012. But if they continue to follow the Clinton-Obama triangulation strategy, they could destroy themselves for years to come. They might even expose the overall bankruptcy of our two-party pseudo-democracy.

(Ted Rall is working on a radical political manifesto for publication this fall. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL