Posted on 04/12/2007 8:59:57 PM PDT by PAUL REVERE TODAY
WASHINGTON, April 11 (UPI) -- The U.S. Army is struggling to convince recent West Point graduates to make the military their career. Recent graduates of the U.S. Military Academy are exiting active duty at the highest rate in more than three decades, the Boston Globe reported Wednesday. Many military specialists say repeated tours in Iraq are driving out some of the Army's best and brightest young officers.
Of the 903 officers who graduated from West Point in 2001, nearly 46 percent left the service in 2006. More than 54 percent of the 935 graduates in the class of 2000 had left active duty by this January, Army statistics showed.
In most years during the last three decades, between 10 percent and 30 percent of West Point graduates opted out after their mandatory five years of service, the newspaper reported.
I can vouch for that bit about the cost of education... I turned down a four year full ride (everything) scholarship plus a National Merit scholarship to go to West Point, and it’s going to cost me more money to go there than my other schools would. I do it because I want to, not because it’s free.
And I get a little tired of people dragging gender into subjects that aren't really relative.
And the questioning as to whether war is "scaring" the "ladies" is way off base IMO.
Look around and tell me how many American women you see serving in some capacity in Iraq.
Y'all can look around and verify that for me, can't you? ;-)
To demand that an obvious question not be asked, is to display deep rooted sexism.
“I don’t know the current numbers but by 1986 the attrition rate for the class of 1980 was 40% female to 25% male for West Point graduates, 23% to 11% for the Air Force Academy, 32% to 24% for Naval Academy graduates that went into the Navy, and 57% to 27% for the Annapolis grads that went into the Marine Corps.”
A couple of KEY points driving the numbers...
1. This report involves ONLY the graduating Classes of 2000 and 2001.
2. These classes started in 1996 and 1997 -— CLINTON ERA.
3. We were still sleeping, and the Academies were free education with little risk. For the most part — the Academies were NOT attracting the “warrior classes”..
4. The “warrior classes” are those men and women who went into the Acadamies AFTER 9/11/2001, KNOWING they were preparing for war.
5. I would EXPECT a high attrition rate from the classes of 2000/2001 for several reasons:
a. They did not expect to be serving in a war time military.
b. They were willing to serve under a draft dodging bastard like Clinton.
c. The utilization of our forces as “nation builders” instead of enemy destroyers — has had a negative effect.
d. The ROEs have also had a negative effect and led to unnecessary casualties.
e. The PC practice of bringing warriors to trial for actions taken in a war zone with only seconds to make decisions — is having a negative effect..
Semper Fi
I could have saved some time, if I had read your post before adding mine....
Good points!
Semper Fi
That West Point Ring counts for something in the Job Market. They did their minimum bit and cashed in.
Though not necessarily ideal in terms of being considered a control group - I believe the Army bears the brunt of the war in Iraq and Afganistan with boots on the ground - I wonder if similar trends might be found in the other service academies?
My brother graduated from Annapolis and went on to have a 20 year career in the Navy and the Reserve before retiring 5 years ago. With exception to extensive campaigns abroad while his family grew he loved it. However, he confided in me that the the Navy made it about as difficult as it could for him to stay. He said that their attitude toward him was that they knew he was going to leave so they treated him badly - this went on for 10 years.
Like many in the service my brother didn’t like to talk about this for 2 reasons; a) he didn’t like to criticize the service b) he told me that he was actually lucky compared to how others in his graduating class had been treated.
One shouldn’t look at this scenario in cold, hard technical terms, but if you remove all the sentiment of honor, patriotism and service to country, you could look at this situation in simple business terms with our personnel simply being “commodities” and “resources” driven by “market forces”.
Under such a scenario could any other enterprise survive in the market if it didn’t make good use of it’s resources? I should hope that some of the idiots serving our country through elected office would have a closer look at this problem, rather than being entangled in pork and non-binding resolutions!
God bless our troops for protecting our families!
The economy is the driving factor and they are getting out because there are jobs for them !
>>>West Point grads leaving U.S. Army
T’is true. Take for example the class of 1928. Not a single one of those slackers is still on the payroll.
The military is too stretched. We are going to see guys getting out of the military like flies at some point. There will be a breaking point.
We and the Administration expected way too much from a very small military...American is not at war but the soldiers,marines,sailors, and airmen are.
This is an Army-wide problem. Captains are leaving in droves - especially after a couple of tours in Iraq and/or A-Stan. The selection rate to Major, ideally, should be around the 70% mark. In the last two to three years the rate has been in the high nineties. If a Captain sticks around to make Major, he generally will stay for at least 20 years.
Re your post #25.
I think you’re right on, Brother!.....Semper Fi.
“Given the nature of the military and its mission, sex is absolutely relevant. To deny that is to live in a fantasy world.”
Hear, hear.
Maybe you should see what happened to the West Point Class of 1966....
Coming from a background almost identical to these young officers (my academy was a few hundred miles to the south of West Point), it's easy to rebel at the situation in which Rumsfeld, GWB and the current crop of political generals have put these captains and within the zone for promotion to major. They've been tasked to command troops in a futile, no-win battle in which they are ordered to allow mission accomplishment to become secondary, or even tertiary, to casualty phobia and sparsity of force application driven by venile political concerns.
Read the comments of the recently retired and dissenting generals in the February or March issue of Vanity Fair and the entire rationale' and explanation of the facts extant in the post come clear.
Indeed, my oldest son (USMA '94), acknowledged these realities on his last visit home in Januaary after returning from his second visit to Iraq (and one to Afghanistan). Even he, with a male family tradition of career military service reaching back to the Civil War, was disheartened enough to confess his frustration and the transient thoughts going back for a graduate degree as a civilian. He is scheduled for yet another deployment in June and is now back at the National Training Center in the California desert; a battalion commander of infantry.
We have become victims of the most inept and corrupt administration in modern U.S. history. That is a sentence I never thought I'd utter about a president for whom I worked diligently in Florida, assisted as part of the 2000 legal team of volunteers, raised money and considering the immediate preceeding eight years of Bill Clinton.
It pains me to say these thing, not because I, as so many others have been fooled, but because they're true.
It seems to me that those leaving because of repeated tours in Iraq are NOT the Army's best.
I suspect that the leadership’s leanings toward a politically correct armed forces have a lot to do with it. Being an army officer is a thankless job in the best of times. When you’ve got to accommodate pointless bull$#!* in the name of PC as well, and your career hangs in the balance, then it could very easily become no longer worth it.
How many times does one have to put one's life on the line for it to be enough?
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