Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the Water

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates defended the quality of our troops, but offered a few lines of appeasement in an attempt to assuage the bubbling anger from service members caught in extended combat tours.

One of the dirtiest, nastiest "secrets" about service members on active duty is the threat of being "stop lossed." To put it bluntly, stop loss is the term used to describe the government's violation of contract with service members. In other words, the government is forcing service members to remain on active duty--and deploy--with their units even though their obligation to serve has expired.

By any other measure, stop loss is enslavement. But since the government needs bodies, it is given a free pass.

According to the article, stop loss affected 12,235 service members in March 2008.

Secretary Gates offered this nugget of information in defense of his policies:

"I've been very worried about stop-loss ever since I got here and found out what it was," Gates said. "I sent the Army a memo a year ago this spring asking for their plan to reduce stop-loss. Unfortunately, my decision to go to 15-month tours just made it impossible for them to achieve that."

In the next paragraph, Secretary Gates all but blamed President Bush for his decision to extend combat tours to 15 months, claiming the troop "surge" necessitated the move.

The natural consequence of contract violation and the subsequent enslavement of service members is lower enlistment ratings. Ah, but the Pentagon has a solution for that, too: lower the standards. Presently, one out of eight recruits (an alarming 12%) requires a waiver to enter military service. Waivers are required for felons, serious misdemeanors, and three or more minor misdemeanors. Indeed, the Pentagon's strategy here seems to be one of lower the water instead of raising the bridge.

Now that it has become official military policy to accept (some) felons into service, we can expect significant erosion of the quality of the product produced. Put another way, we can expect an alternative form of Gresham's Law: bad service members will drive out the good ones. If Secretary Gates remains positive about the quality of troop levels now, I'm curious what kinds of adjectives he'll offer in defense of our soldiers in a few years.