I Are A Soldier

What a lovely article that misses the point entirely...

St. Louis Post-Dispatch
August 20, 2006
Pg. B3

Dumbing Down G.I. Joe

'Be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.'

By Kevin Horrigan

Last Wednesday, Bryan Bender reported in the Boston Globe that the Pentagon quietly has begun reviewing its mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. A major goal is improving counter-insurgency tactics; that is, fighting a low-grade war against insurgents who disappear into an indigenous population.

Col. Peter Mansoor commands the Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The story quotes him thusly: "The challenge is to train the force not what to think, but how to think. Counterinsurgency is a thinking soldier's war. It is graduate-level stuff. There is public relations, civil affairs, information operations. It is not easy.

"To read Bender's story is to be reminded -- and to be grateful -- that the Army has a corps of super-bright young officers who know how to read a scoreboard. Unfortunately, they're not in charge yet.

Also on Wednesday, David Wood of the Baltimore Sun reported, "At a time when the Defense Department is calling for the 'best and the brightest' to fight today's tricky and unconventional wars, the Army is quietly signing up thousands of low-scoring recruits, who historically have performed less well, in order to meet its recruiting goals."

Let's see . . . one of the lessons of the last three years is that we're going to need smarter soldiers. So let's lower the standards...

What this guy fails to point out is that each job in the Army has a GT score requirement. Just because the Army lowered the minimum score to join doesn't mean that next week you'll be seeing 8th grade dropouts with a GED as the point man for a LRSD team. This is such a disingenuous article...once again never let the actual facts get in the way of a good story.