Please Ignore the Good News

The Secretary of the Army, Dr. Francis J. Harvey swears in Shirley Salvi, the Army’s 80,000th recruit for fiscal year 2006. This event marked the Army’s achievement of its annual recruiting goal.

Active Duty Recruiting Exceeds Goals

Last year the media obsessed over the news that the US Army missed its annual recruitment goal. It was the first time since the 9/11 attacks that the Army missed their goal. They came up short of their objective of 80,000 recruits by 6,600 soldiers. While it cannot be denied that the Army missed its recruitment target for that year, it would be relevant to address the fact that the goal had been substantially raised from previous years in order to meet the growing demands of the War on Terror.

The Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, pointed out that the 73,400 new recruits in 2005 were within 2% of the average recruitment amount for the past 10 years. So the higher goal made it seem much worse than it really was. In addition, the Army exceeded its re-enlistment goals to help compensate for the shortage.

Now that a year has past, why aren’t there any more stories about the dire straits that our military recruitment is suffering from? It turns out that this year the Army swore in its 80,000th recruit one week early. In addition, if you include this year’s surplus of re-enlistments (over 3,000 soldiers), we have more than made up for last year’s shortage! So now the Army has more men under arms than any other time over the last decade. The size of the active army is about 505,000, a 12,000 gain from the previous year and the highest since 1995!!!!!!! Of course, Good News is No News.

However, it is encouraging that the Army has exceeded its new elevated goal, which was adjusted to compensate for the War on Terror. This brings up serious questions about claims made by Congressman John Murtha and other leading Democrats that our military is “broken”.

As a decorated Marine you would think that Murtha knows what he is talking about, right? Let’s take a look at his statements which dominated the headlines last year. Now we can see how they have stood up to the test of time.

In December of 2005 Congressman Murtha was very concerned about the National Guard units from his home state of Pennsylvania that were deployed in Iraq. He stated that they were “stretched so thin” that they wouldn’t be able to send fully equipped units back to Iraq in 2006. However, Lt. Colonel Chris Cleaver, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania National Guard, said most of the PA Guard deployed at that time couldn’t be sent back to Iraq for a second tour of duty because of regulations that limit redeployment. So it was a moot point to begin with.

Regardless of that fact, just how stretched out was the Pennsylvania National Guard? If they were indeed impaired by the war it could have had serious consequences. The PA 2nd Brigade was headquartered in the bloody capital of the Al Anbar Province at Camp Ramadi. At the time it was considered to be the center of the Iraqi insurgency. On January 1st, shortly after Murtha had his nervous breakdown saying that the Army is broken and his state’s National Guard was stretched thin, the Pennsylvania Iron Brigade serving in Iraq announced that it was certified with a 94% operational readiness rate (around 90% is considered average). Towards the end of their deployment in May of 2006 they were rated at 96%. Since the brigade completed its deployment in great shape, maybe it’s not the National Guard that is broken.

The timing for Murtha’s attack on the military was very odd. Iraq had just completed a general election to select its permanent National Assembly on December 15th, 2005. In an operation that critics said couldn’t be done, his National Guard troops secured the volatile city for the elections. This allowed Iraq to move forward to the last step of reclaiming its full sovereignty. As the Ranking Member on the House Appropriations Sub-Committee on Defense I’m sure Murtha knew all of this.

The biggest test of whether or not the Army is broken would be its morale and a good measure of Army morale is the re-enlistment rate. If the troops are discouraged and beaten then they aren’t going to re-enlist. Since the Army met its re-enlistment goal a month early and the National Guard also exceeded their goal, it is clear that the morale of our troops is very high. It is Murtha himself that is broken and worn out.

Yet that’s not the end of Murtha’s misinformation. He has continually repeated his mantra that our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. Yet sectarian violence between the Sunnis and Shiites has claimed the largest death toll during this insurgency. July was the bloodiest month of the year with 558 violent deaths in Baghdad and 77% of these casualties were the result of sectarian violence. Murtha has access to this information as well, he should know better.

I have no doubt that Murtha was motivated by compassion for the wounded soldiers he has visited and was inspired to go on a crusade on their behalf... But something went terribly wrong. In January of this year he was presented a “Pink Badge of Courage” award for his anti-war activism by the protest group, CodePink.

It is a bit ironic that this group has also been involved in the controversial protests of the Walter Reed Military Hospital where a large number of soldiers go to recuperate from wounds they received in Iraq. When you read about Murtha you will note that he often brags of his visits to wounded troops whenever he denounces the war. For his sake, I hope he coordinated with CodePink so that he wasn’t seen associating with protesters who harassed wounded soldiers.

The protests were known for featuring mock coffins and inflammatory signs designed to agitate the wounded troops that traveled in and out of Walter Reed. Signs like “Maimed for a Lie”, “Enlist Here to Die for Halliburton” and a particularly nasty one labeled “Bloody Hands” (with blood red hand prints all over it).

In their hatred for the military CodePink has been quite active in the counter recruitment movement. As a matter of fact since 9/11 there have been a number of attacks on recruiting stations. In February of 2005 Brendan Walsh was sentenced to five years in prison for firebombing a recruiting station in upstate NY. Other recruiting stations have had their windows smashed and have been shut down by protesters.

Yet all of these counter recruitment efforts are failing.