Say Anything Blog

You know all those media reports about military recruiting we’ve been reading about in recent years?  The ones about how our military is struggling to meet it’s recruiting goals?  That often have journalists pushing the idea that our desperate military is resorting to filling its ranks with criminals in order to make its goals?  Wondering why you haven’t heard too much about that particular left-wing anti-war talking point for a while?

It could be because all branches of the military met its active duty recruiting goals for fiscal year 2006...

...and have met or exceeded their recruiting goals for every month since.

October of 2006:

November of 2006:

December of 2006:

January of 2007:

February of 2007:

March of 2007:

April of 2007:

The National Guard/Reservist situation is a little bit different.  In fiscal year 2006 only the Marine Corps Reserve and the Air Force reserve met their recruiting goals, though the Army National Guard came exceedingly close:

Yet every month of this fiscal year the Army National Guard, Marine Corps Reserve, the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve have all met or exceeded their recruiting goals (with the exception of February and April for the Army National Guard and Air National Guard, and March as well for the ANG).  See the links above.

So what does this mean?  It means that recruiting is strong for the branches of our military that see the most action in Iraq (Army and Marine active duty), and gets only slightly weaker for those branches where a troop is less likely to see action (Army NG and then on down through the Navy/Air Force reserves).  Which means that of the people choosing to sign up for the military, most of them are signing up with an inclination toward going to Iraq.

Sort of throws a monkey wrench in that whole “Bush’s unpopular war” line when the military has such little trouble finding citizens willing to risk their lives for it, doesn’t it?