Dec 03 2008
Service Members Re-enlisting at High Rates Because of Poor Economy
Although many areas of the job market are in big doo-doo right now, the U.S. military is not one of them, thanks to the re-appearance of one of its greatest recruiters. His name is Maj. Recession, a man Uncle Sam can always count on to make mission.
According to John Milburn and Stephen Manning of Wiredispatch.com, soldiers, sailors, and airmen are re-enlisting at unusually high rates, in part because of the poor job market and the economic troubles resulting from the recent financial crisis on Wall St.
Of course, there are others factors at play here, including the decline of violence in Iraq, but historically speaking, a bad economy has always been good for military recruiting.
Army Sgt. Ryan Nyhus is one of many service members who decided to re-up because of our nation’s financial woes.
“Sgt. Ryan Nyhus spent 14 months patrolling the deadly streets of Baghdad, where five members of his platoon were shot and one died,” Milburn and Manning write, “As bad as that was, he would rather go back there than take his chances in this brutal job market. Nyhus re-enlisted last Wednesday, and in so doing joined the growing ranks of those choosing to stay in the U.S. military because of the bleak economy.”
“In the Army, you’re always guaranteed a steady paycheck and a job,” said the 21-year-old Nyhus. “Deploying’s something that’s going to happen. That’s a fact of life in the Army — a fact of life in the infantry.”
Thanks to Maj. Recession, the Defense Department has just finished one of its most successful recruiting years in recent memory.
“We do benefit when things look less positive in civil society,” said David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. “What difficult economic times give us, I think, is an opening to make our case to people who we might not otherwise have.”
Source: Wiredispatch.com
If one can live with the possibility that one may be put in a life threatening situation, but the chances are you’ll survive, the military is a good place to get a paycheck, plus learn a good profession. Not everybody ends up in the infantry!
My dad, in WWII, learned radio electronics there, and from there, after the war, self taught into a job as an electrician, which supported us for years until he died.
Plus, there IS a plus to learning some self discipline, which most people learn from their enlistment. That is a good thing, too.
One gets a good feeling from knowing that one has served the country.
Plus, there are still some GI benefits, too, that also helps.
I really don’t see a downside, as long as one goes in with the certain knowledge that one WILL get deployed, and one WILL be put into dangerous situations, and you have a chance of dying.
Of course, nobody under the age of 25 believes that for one second, do they?
While the military is definitely not for me, it does provide a gateway to the future that may be unclear to some in this time of recession…
I agree that the military is a great deal for people of all backgrounds and motivations as long as you dno’t mind living in an authoritarian environment.
Good point about the infantry R! Many people have this bizarre misconception from watching too many war movies that if you join the military, they’re going to put a rifle in your hand and send you out into combat the day after you enlist. An interesting fact about Vietnam is that, despite the images from films like FULL METAL JACKET and PLATOON, only 1/5 of the actual military was engaged in hostile fire with the enemy on a regular basis. The rest served as cooks, truck drivers, clerks, laundrymen, mechanics, musicians, journalists, typists, film projectionists (ie Ward Churchill), financiers, and even ice-cream machine operators. And most of these people never saw an iota of combat.
Btw, i have NO sympathy for people who join up and then want to quit. If you are too lazy to do your own research on military life and lack the commons sense to see that it is not always as fun as your recruiter portrays it, then TS.
This is an important post. I realize public discourse refers to the present military as “voluteer”; but what we really have is a privatized army made up of professional soldiers and it is not like it was for our fathers, my brother, et al. I live in the middle of the military industrial complex and all I can say is talk to service people. Talk to their families, and get the real story. From a linguistics standpoint the whole “Volunteer” thing makes me very angry. Thanks! ~k
Karen, i must respectfully disagree with you here. Although many factors may pressure people into enlisting, the bottom line is that they don’t have to if they don’t want to.
But i do agree that the rise of the professional Army here in the U.S. may have some serious implications for our future as a republic. For more on that, see my previous article on the subject, if you hwaven’t read it yet.
http://politicalanimal.today.com/2008/11/13/the-growing-threat-of-militarism/
Btw, have any of you guys ever served or have a sibling or relative in the military? I have a brother who’s been in the Marines for 16 years now.
Yes, I was in Germany for four years. 1/6 Mechanized Infantry, 1st Armored Division. 11B, light weapons Infantry, with an additional speciality as an armored personnel carrier driver.
Frankly, as I have noted before in our exchanges, I think your fears about a professional military are founded on misconceptions about the attitudes of those professionals, and the fact you don’t see, which is that a large percentage of the lower ranks that fill the grunt jobs are just normal civilians that are rotating through in short two to four year enlistments. As a matter of fact, I am not sure they do two years anymore. That is by far the majority of the numbers in the Armed Forces.
The professional core of the non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers are there as the necessary framework that is needed to keep our forces strong and to prevent the loss of the experience and institutional knowledge needed to make it run like it should.
Our country’s experiences in the past of being surprised at the beginning of conflicts with too few pros to build a strong force around should be a good reminder that to lose that core is to court disaster.
This world is too violent, too dangerous to do otherwise.
If you don’t think so, watch Christiane Amanpour’s show airing tonight through tomorrow on CNN, “Scream Bloody Murder” about genocides in the last few decades.
It’ll shock the pants off of you, and maybe make you rethink some of your opinions about non-intervention.
As you watch it, notice that ALL of the groups being slaughtered are non-white or non-christian, and got ignored until it was too late.
We are still ignoring Sudan.
Well I’m a proffesional officer in the reserves who served over 7 years on active duty. I’ve been enlisted prior to my commisioning. Traditionally every peace time army has been made up of the lowest social/political/economic spectrum. A visiting German officer visiting America at the dawn of the 20th Century said that the US Army should be called the American Foreign Legion b/c all the non native born members it had. Today’s “peacetime” army is a lot larger than the norm but a previous post was correct that about 80-90% of the Soldiers are 2-4 year volunteers who pass through the system for job training or college money and I don’t see anything wrong with that. Service to the state should equal service to the citizen. As far as the military industrial complex… and? There is an industrial complex to make money off every facet of society, just ask Disney?