from my high school graduating class who experienced the Armageddon of our generation.”25 Even though the draft was never reinstated during the War on Terror, there were symmetries with recruitment trends from the Vietnam era. In the War on Terror, the US military again focused on enlisting society’s poorest. Denied the draft, however, it fell back on another method learned from attempts to swell the ranks during Vietnam: changing the regulations on enlistment. In 1965, as the troop buildup in South Vietnam grew, the military started to abandon its standards for recruitment and hundreds of thousands of men who scored among the lowest IQ percentiles were admitted for the first time. “Prior to American escalation in Vietnam such men were routinely rejected, but with a war on these ‘new standards’ were suddenly declared fit to fight. Rejection rates plummeted,” writes one historian.26 In 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instituted a program called “Project 100,000,” which aimed to increase the levels of troops by that number within two years by admitting civilians who had previously not met the required standards.27
The New Look
Without conscription and with recruitment targets being consistently missed, the Bush administration and the Pentagon devised a similar plan. By subcontracting out myriad operational tasks to private military institutions like Blackwater and DynCorp, who received billions of dollars in government largesse to man the frontlines in the War on Terror, the government had partially dealt with the gap between its demand for cannon fodder and the supply of quality troops. A thin coalition of countries, later including NATO troops in Afghanistan and the UN in Iraq, helped ameliorate the chronic troop deficits. But it wasn’t enough. In 2004, Bush took another unusual step to plug the hole: he called up 37,000 members of the National Guard to go to fight in the deserts of Iraq.28 Not since the Korean War had there been such a mobilization: the National Guard had served in the Gulf War and Kosovo, but in nowhere near such huge numbers. By June 2005, they accounted for 45 percent of the total army in Iraq.29 Then there were the monetary inducements, which became quite lucrative for service members and crippling for the Pentagon. The Rand Corporation conducted an in-depth study which found that the DOD budget for enlistment and reenlistment bonuses had skyrocketed between 2000 to 2008, more than doubling to $1.4 billion for reenlistment bonuses. The average army enlistment bonus increased from $5,600 to about $18,000 per soldier over the same period.30 In just three years, from 2006 to 2009, the army dispensed with $1 billion to recruit 64,526 active-duty and reserve soldiers. Army Reserve recruits saw their bonuses more than double over the same period, to $19,500. But the study also found that in the army recruiters themselves tend to be a more cost-effective way to swell the ranks of the military than enlistment bonuses or pay increases. The Bush administration took that route too. To achieve its 2007 goals, the army increased its 8,000-strong recruiting force with 2,000 new assistants.31
At the same time—and perhaps most importantly—those who should have been kicked out were being allowed to stay. In June 2005, the Wall Street Journal turned up an internal memo to senior commanders which called the growing dropout rate—called “attrition” in military jargon—“a matter of great concern.” “We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend,” it read. “By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That’s 3,000 more soldiers in our formations.” It was an explicit call to drop standards: the message being that soldiers addicted to alcohol and drugs, those who lose their fitness, or their mental poise, shouldn’t be discharged. It was batten down the hatches time. The Wall Street Journal quoted a battalion commander as saying: “It is the guys on weight control . . . school no-shows, drug users, etc., who eat up my time and cause my hair to grey prematurely . . . Often they have more than one of these issues simultaneously.”32 Such sentiments did not occur in a vacuum. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were, in fact, allowing the dismantling of the whole regulatory structure for enlistment and retention that the US armed forces had built up in the twenty-five years since Vietnam. The slim military needed fattening up and this was the only way to do it. In the end it constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve in the US armed forces, a full-works facelift of the service unheard of in the annals of modern American history. In the relatively halcyon days of the First Gulf War in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kick out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers, and the mentally ill. It would pass up the services of foreign citizens to fight its wars. No more. While the Bush administration adopted conservative policies pretty much universally, it saved its ration of liberalism for the US military, where it scrapped all the previously sacrosanct regulations governing recruitment to the most powerful fighting force in the world. Under the aegis of the War on Terror, the US armed forces became a Mecca for the “different,” the weird and wonderful (and dangerous) of America.
Throughout all this, however, the military maintained a rictus, everything-in-order, smile for the public. As late as August 2007, when the crisis befalling the institution had become widely known, Michael Dominguez, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, began his testimony to a Congressional hearing with a slap on the back for the US military: “Let me begin by acknowledging an historic achievement that many, including some of our own experts, would have thought impossible a few years ago,” he said. “We have taken an all-volunteer military to war. We have done it in a strong economy with 4.5 percent unemployment. We often have asked that force and their families to do more on short notice. And through it all, we have manned this nation’s military with people far above average relative to their peers.”33 It was simply untrue. The average member of the US military was no longer far above their average peer. The following chapters will show how the Bush administration, together with a pliant Pentagon (and the succeeding Obama administration), enabled the US military to undergo the biggest and fastest transformation in its history. Each chapter will cover a different group of people who have been enfranchised through the War on Terror as the US military scrambled for troops. The different weightings and amount of reporting on each group reflects the fact that some of these changes in regulation have been explicit (for example, rules on body weight and IQ) while others have been completely denied (from neo-Nazis to gang members). Still others have been hushed up as far as possible—such as the vast numbers of young Americans scarred for life by mental illness, left untreated and forsaken.
It will become clear quite quickly that it is not just American soldiers who have been short-changed by Rumsfeld’s vision—the occupied populations have been sacrificed with rivers of their own blood. Many of the wars’ worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. Then there is the domestic US population, which has had to put up with military-trained gang members marauding around their cities; as well as Mexican civilians who have paid with their lives in the drug wars facilitated in part by the US military. The effects of this will be felt for decades to come. Finally, there’s the safety of the troops themselves. Loosening standards on intelligence and body weight, for example, compromised the military’s operational readiness and undoubtedly endangered the lives of American and allied troops. Hundreds of young Americans may have paid with their lives for this folly.
US society changed profoundly after the September 11 attacks and during the subsequent wars. In many ways, the military is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn, and the changes in the composition of the US military and its regulations over this period reflected a country in political, cultural, and economic reverse gear. As America became increasingly bigoted and inward-looking, so radicalism in the US military increased. As young people became ever fatter, so too did the soldiers. As the criminal justice system locked more and more people up, so the military had to increase the numbers of felons it allowed in. “Today’s young men and women are more overweight . . . and are being charged for offenses that in earlier years wouldn’t have been considered a serious offense, and might not have resulted in charges in the first place,” an army spokesman complained in 2008.34 At the height of the War on Terror, only one in three men in the general population met the pre-9/11 physical, mental, educational, and other eligibility requirements needed to enlist in the armed forces. “The numbers of people who meet our enlistment standards is astonishingly
