"None of the military services have any trouble meeting recruiting goals..."

I challenged this statement when someone else put it forward in another one of these threads a while back, and was quickly contradicted. I was too busy and didn't take the opportunity to argue back at that time, but I'm not letting this misleading statement go by again without commenting:

That the services have not yet failed to meet an annual recruiting goal is, indeed, true in a purely technical sense, but they are meeting their goals only with ever-increasing difficulty. Specifically, the educational standards are lowered on a regular basis in order to meet quotas, and an ever-increasing proportion of high-school dropouts are being accepted each month as new recruits.

Well, I suppose it could be argued that the standards themselves are etched in stone and not "lowered," but an ever-increasing number of exceptions are being allowed.

I heard a lengthy report on NPR on this issue a while ago, featuring interviews with several Army officers, both in the Pentagon and out in the field in combat. The presence of more and more underqualified recruits is a problem, since many of these young men are at least as difficult to train and supervise as draftees ever were.

Interestingly, more than one of the officers interviewed volunteered the opinion that the most pressing problem with these dropout/recruits is not lack of intelligence or even lack of schooling, but lack of self-discipline and inability to respond appropriately to authority.

Whether or not recruiting goals are being met, it cannot be denied that the US military is drastically overextended these days. Unless the government changes direction and scales back combat operations while resuming our former policies of diplomacy, multilateralism, etc., I don't see how an effort to reinstate the draft could be avoided.

Of course, any such effort is bound to meet with serious grassroots opposition. I'd hate to have to go through that all over again, but I don't think I could stand idly by without trying my best to oppose it