Thursday, February 03, 2005

Military recruitment squeeze

Lawmakers by a vote of 327 to 84 approved a resolution endorsing aggressive White House enforcement of a law already allowing the Pentagon the power to deny federal funding to any college or university which prevents military recruitment on its campus.

[...]

"Such policies are obnoxious in times of peace, but they are simply intolerable in times of war, and the equal access of our military recruiters to federally-funded colleges and universities must be protected," [House Majority Leader Tom DeLay] said.
  Yahoo News article

Oh, I think we know obnoxious when we see it.

Actually, this doesn't surprise me in the least. Part of ensuring a "voluntary" army is in creating conditions where poor young people are forced into the service because there are no jobs (outsourcing) and higher education is prohibitively expensive (unfunded by the government).

And when we've run out of soldiers we can slap stop loss orders on and soldiers we can involuntarily re-enlist, and when we can't get new recruits by leaning on colleges, or by any other method, that old draft bugaboo will surely rise up. The alternative? Privatize the armed forces. Mercenaries and death squads. There are a lot of men just south of the border who are looking for a way to earn a living.

Oh wait. Bush is all for making illegal Mexican immigrants into U.S. citizens. I suspect he's already one step ahead of me on creating "voluntary" forces from the poor.

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