The US military has announced that they have missed their recruiting goals for the month of April and expect to do so again for the month of May. As for individual branches of the armed forces, most have missed recruiting goals for significant periods of time this year. The Army has missed its goal for three months, the Marines four, and the National Guard every month in fiscal 2005. The Army expects to miss its goal again in May.
Meanwhile, news has come out of recruiters engaging in a variety of tactics designed to dodge Army rules in an effort to gain recruits and meet quotas for new enlistments. A student at a Denver area high school taped two recruiters who offered to help him obtain a falsified high school diploma and provided a detox therapy to pass military drug tests in an effort to sign him up for the military despite being ineligible. A report published yesterday in The New York Times found that recruiters are increasingly “bending the rules” to sign up recruits–offering to help falsify documents, providing “cheat sheets” to recruits taking military aptitude tests, and hiding police records and mental illnesses. According to the article, this behavior is increasingly present among military recruiters who feel pressured to meet quotas and that punishments are rare as long as recruiters continue to meet their quotas.
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