So it takes a real bad economy to recruit young men and woman to join the military who otherwise might not get employment. Part of this real bad economy, a significant part, is the Iraq conflict. Are we in for another lost generation?

A fifteen-month obligation?

Three months for boot camp, more or less, leaves one year for actual useful service, not counting occupational school. These people will be getting out right when they've just begun being useful. Because they're sure as hell not going to use up school quotas and funding with early-out bodies.

Unless: Enlist for fifteen months, be put into a cannon-fodder MOS, and watch that stop-loss order keep you in for as long as we want, contract be damned. Now, that makes sense, and it's just the sort of thing the Mayberry Machiavellis would pull.

They really do think we're retarded, don't they?

Upping the enlistment age, that's pretty scary too. Hell, I'm almost 38 and would drop dead after three days of boot.

The thing to keep in mind when dealing with military recruiters, is what they don't tell you. Like your service can (will) be extended beyond the original 15-month contract.
Or that you won't have any choice of duty station.
Or choice of MOS.
Or that they can send you to a camp in Minnesota in January to shrink your butt quickly.
It still beats the draft.
Draft Clark? He's a political mercenary unfit to scrub a latrine at Grafenwohr, or the Baghdad Airport.

"You are paid to stop a bullet." It's a soldier's job, they say. And then you stop the bullet. And then they stop your pay. Anyone so ignorant that they don't understand the above when they sign up should be taken out of the gene pool.

1. Timely
   
2. Strategery
   
3. Webb wins
   
4. Huh?
   
5. Bunnypants in Bagdad
   
6. Outage
   
7. Filthy Lucre Watch
   
8. Playing the numbers
   
9. My letter to Countdown
   
10. Jefferson's Nigerian Scams