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Thread: Weight, ADHD drugs, Felony convictions preventing people from joining the military

  1. #1

    Exclamation Weight, ADHD drugs, Felony convictions preventing people from joining the military

    Recruits Ineligibility Tests the Military

    http://online.wsj.com/articles/recru...hatsNewsSecond

    June 27, 2014 6:59 p.m. ET

    More than two-thirds of America's youth would fail to qualify for military service because of physical, behavioral or educational shortcomings, posing challenges to building the next generation of soldiers even as the U.S. draws down troops from conflict zones.

    The military deems many youngsters ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high-school diploma, felony convictions and prescription-drug use for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But others are now also running afoul of standards for appearance amid the growing popularity of large-scale tattoos and devices called ear gauges that create large holes in earlobes.

    A few weeks ago, Brittany Crippen said she tried to enlist in the Army, only to learn that a tattoo of a fish on the back of her neck disqualified her. Determined to join, the 19-year-old college student visited a second recruiting center in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and was rejected again.

    Apologetic recruiters encouraged her to return after removing the tattoo, a process she was told would take about year. "I was very upset," Ms. Crippen said.

    The military services don't keep figures on how many people they turn away. But the Defense Department estimates 71% of the roughly 34 million 17- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. would fail to qualify to enlist in the military if they tried, a figure that doesn't even include those turned away for tattoos or other cosmetic issues. Meanwhile, only about 1% of youths are both "eligible and inclined to have a conversation with us" about military service, according to Major Gen. Allen Batschelet, commanding general of U.S. Army Recruiting Command.

    Comparable data aren't available for earlier years because the Pentagon began tracking eligibility only recently. But experts said seniors graduating from high school this year face the longest odds to qualify for military service since the draft was abolished in 1973.

    "The quality of people willing to serve has been declining rapidly," said Gen. Batschelet.

    Each year, about 180,000 young men and women successfully volunteer for America's active-duty forces. An additional 110,000 join the services' reserve and National Guard units. Individual services manage their own recruiting and have the authority to grant waivers to applicants who don't meet broad standards.

    When the military faced escalating foreign engagement in recent years, recruiting standards were loosened: In 2007, only 79% of those who enlisted in the Army had completed high school, compared with 90% in 2001, while the Army also accepted recruits with more excess body fat during the height of the Iraq war.

    "We have not adopted a zero-defect mentality. We evaluate each applicant from a whole-person perspective," said Nathan Christensen, a Defense Department spokesman, who added that military services have been meeting their recruiting targets in recent years.

    To some degree, that has been aided by enlistment bonuses. From 2000 to 2008, the Defense budget for enlistment bonuses more than doubled to $625 million, and it jumped more than 50% to $1.4 billion for selective re-enlistment bonuses, according to a Rand Corp. analysis.

    Obesity, the single biggest reason for disqualifying new recruits, and other obstacles, such as poor educational attainment, led 90 retired military leaders in 2009 to form Mission: Readiness, a nonprofit aimed at raising awareness and seeking solutions. The group has lobbied state and federal officials to improve nutrition in schools and expand access to early education.

    "We're trying to make decision makers see this is a national-security matter—and they need to prioritize it," said retired Major Gen. Allen Youngman. In the past, he said, "a drill sergeant could literally run the weight off a soldier as part of the regular training program," but now, "we have young people showing up at the recruiter's office who want to serve but are 50 or more pounds overweight."

    About a quarter of high-school graduates also can't pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which measures math and reading skills, Gen. Youngman said. "They aren't educationally qualified to join the military in any capacity, not just the high-tech jobs," he said.

    U.S. Army First Sgt. James Sawyer, who heads recruiting across a swath of Los Angeles County, said tattoos have become the most common cosmetic reason that applicants are disqualified. The Army already banned tattoos on the face, neck and fingers, but according to regulations in effect May 1, soldiers also can't have more than a total of four visible tattoos below the elbows and knees, and tattoos must be relatively small. The goal of the tattoo rules is to maintain a professional-looking Army, Sgt. Sawyer said. He added that "the average person in California has a tattoo."

    Gabby Guillen, director of tattoo removal at Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles nonprofit that provides services to former gang members, said that "on a daily basis, people come in saying they don't qualify for the military because of their tattoos. They have visible tattoos. Sometimes it's behind the neck area, on the hands, face, ears."

    Sgt. Sawyer's El Monte, Calif., recruiting center serves towns with a total population of 325,000 people. It enlists 10 to 15 people a month. "A lot of times, we don't even get to the interview stage," said the sergeant on a recent afternoon as some would-be soldiers dropped in.

    One young man showed up with two gaping holes in his earlobes, the result of wearing ear gauges. "Come back when they're closed," the recruiter said, after jotting down the applicant's information.

    David Monzon, a 23-year-old East Los Angeles man, said he had long wanted to join the Army but wasn't able to enlist after graduating; at 5 feet 6 inches tall, he weighed 300 pounds. After researching weight-loss programs, Mr. Monzon eliminated pizza, chili-cheese fries and other fatty foods from his diet, and he began riding his bike everywhere.

    In February, Mr. Monzon walked into the recruiting center weighing 210 pounds. Sgt. Sawyer told him he was impressed but that he still needed to drop a few more pounds.

    "I was pretty confident I would make it," Mr. Monzon said. He did. Now 190 pounds, Mr. Monzon is heading to South Carolina for basic training in September.

    Ms. Crippen, meanwhile, said she was still considering whether to remove her fish tattoo, the only one of four tattoos she has that is problematic. "My parents said they'll pay for it, but right now I really don't know what I'll do," she said. "My tattoo isn't offensive."
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11



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  3. #2
    Back in the Vietnam draft days, would extensive tattoo work keep you from being drafted?

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by specsaregood View Post
    Back in the Vietnam draft days, would extensive tattoo work keep you from being drafted?
    Being a member here might.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by luctor-et-emergo View Post
    Being a member here might.
    I'll just go sit on the bench with the mother rapers, father stabbers and father rapers.

  6. #5
    Note to self:

    Get large tattoo if draft is ever reinstated.

    I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. -Smedley Butler
    Last edited by presence; 06-30-2014 at 12:11 PM.

    'We endorse the idea of voluntarism; self-responsibility: Family, friends, and churches to solve problems, rather than saying that some monolithic government is going to make you take care of yourself and be a better person. It's a preposterous notion: It never worked, it never will. The government can't make you a better person; it can't make you follow good habits.' - Ron Paul 1988

    Awareness is the Root of Liberation Revolution is Action upon Revelation

    'Resistance and Disobedience in Economic Activity is the Most Moral Human Action Possible' - SEK3

    Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

    ...the familiar ritual of institutional self-absolution...
    ...for protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment...


  7. #6
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/n...operty-rights/

    As heartening as that good news is, the reasons the State won’t enroll “American Youth” to murder while leeching off our taxes are even more delicious. Kids now are “too obese” after fattening on the corn syrup Leviathan subsidizes and eating the grains and carbs the USDA promotes. They “lack … a high-school diploma” because they’ve responded in the only sensible way to the State’s dangerous and excruciatingly boring educational gulag: they dropped out. Alas, they didn’t do so before those indoctrination centers could hook them on “prescription-drug[s] … for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,” another of the body-snatchers’ big no-nos. Funny how picky the Feds are when hiring hit-men, isn’t it? Yo, Rulers: zonking out killers on “prescription drugs” works for massacres here on the sheeple: why not overseas? And finally, too many would-be recruits in our police-state boast “felony convictions.” Love it! You certainly don’t want a “criminal” slaughtering innocent foreigners, now, do you?
    Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
    --Albert J. Nock

  8. #7
    Each year, about 180,000 young men and women successfully volunteer for America's active-duty forces.
    The idea that we have a "volunteer force" is a misnomer anyway. 180k didn't volunteer. Almost all of them were thoroughly screened and actively recruited. Many of them were cajoled and lured by a false bill of goods by recruiters who gets bounties for each signature on a line. On the positive side, its good to have an outside assessment on modern public education.

    XNN
    "They sell us the president the same way they sell us our clothes and our cars. They sell us every thing from youth to religion the same time they sell us our wars. I want to know who the men in the shadows are. I want to hear somebody asking them why. They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are but theyre never the ones to fight or to die." - Jackson Browne Lives In The Balance

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by XNavyNuke View Post
    The idea that we have a "volunteer force" is a misnomer anyway. 180k didn't volunteer. Almost all of them were thoroughly screened and actively recruited. Many of them were cajoled and lured by a false bill of goods by recruiters who gets bounties for each signature on a line. On the positive side, its good to have an outside assessment on modern public education.

    XNN
    They give bounties now?
    Insanity should be defined as trusting the government to solve a problem they caused in the first place. Please do not go insane!



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by TonySutton View Post
    They give bounties now?
    Recruiters used to have a quota, if they exceeded the quota they got bonuses..

    Bounty is a good word though...

  12. #10
    I saw a comic decades ago talking about getting drafted for Vietnam. The recruitment office doctor told him that if he'd lose twenty pounds they'd love to have him. So, he went home and started a diet--of doughnuts and beer.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    You only want the freedoms that will undermine the nation and lead to the destruction of liberty.

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by TonySutton View Post
    They give bounties now?
    Not legally, but since when has that stopped anyone? Its a game that has been played many different ways through history.

    Old Story.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/us...stigators.html

    Some recruiting assistants eligible for bonuses were coerced into splitting them with military recruiters, who were barred from getting payments themselves. Other military recruiters did not tell their civilian assistants about the bonuses, but registered them for the program, and then substituted their own bank information for their civilian assistants, army officials said.
    XNN
    "They sell us the president the same way they sell us our clothes and our cars. They sell us every thing from youth to religion the same time they sell us our wars. I want to know who the men in the shadows are. I want to hear somebody asking them why. They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are but theyre never the ones to fight or to die." - Jackson Browne Lives In The Balance

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by phill4paul View Post
    I'll just go sit on the bench with the mother rapers, father stabbers and father rapers.
    On Trump:
    How conservative Republicans can continue to support this arrogant imposter—the man who brags about inflicting the world with the Covid mark of the beast; the man who said, “Take the guns first, go through due process second”; and the man who deliberately played and then set up Stewart Rhodes (of course, Stewart was all too eager to be Trump’s patsy) for an 18-year prison sentence—is truly beyond my comprehension.” Chuck Baldwin

  15. #13
    lol.
    The system is collapsing on itself.
    The obvious answer is penal military units.

    All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
    -Albert Camus

  16. #14
    And the standards they do have are a joke. Last month a 55 year old guy completed basic training. Maybe I should get back in and go to Ranger school.
    Out of every one hundred men they send us, ten should not even be here. Eighty will do nothing but serve as targets for the enemy. Nine are real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, upon them depends our success in battle. But one, ah the one, he is a real warrior, and he will bring the others back from battle alive.

    Duty is the most sublime word in the English language. Do your duty in all things. You can not do more than your duty. You should never wish to do less than your duty.



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