Yeah, it was almost inevitable. As the demand for boots in Mess O'Potamia increased, so too did the demand for fresh new faces to fill them. Clearly, the Yellow Elephant Class were not/are not going to fill them, they're too busy "fighting the war of ideas" here at home, not to mention staying in those well-paid Wingnut Think-tank jobs, all safe and secure.

So what's happened? Apparently recruits who might not normally make it out of basic training are finding their way into the field as fully-trained infantrymen. Recruits whose allegiance is perhaps to their unit for the time being, but might also be to such organizations as the Aryan Nations or the Crips...in short, not the kind of folks we want our tax dollars training in Urban Combat with weapons of small-scale destruction.

The military (and I thought I had written on this before) went through some serious convulsions with respect to race, and race relations back in the early 70s. The story of the Navy and its troubles and eventual salvation are the one I'm most familiar with, having lived through a good part of it first hand.

A couple of incidents at sea, most prominently aboard USS Kitty Hawk and USS Constellation (you can read the congressional report and narrative here) focused the attention of the entire Navy, and one man in particular, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt on the issues surrounding race relations and it's importance to the command structure and the entire US Navy. Zumwalt was hated by most of the senior enlisted and senior officers of the early 70s Navy, with a passion. But he stepped up and did what needed to be done to help move the Navy from a very autocratic, racially divided service to one where the individual contributions of every sailor were valued. The shift in mindset that he propagated are still in force today, and have made the Navy a pretty damn great organization.

So what's up with the Army? Well, my understanding is that they followed the best they could, and made an effort to crawl out of the same hole that their sister service was in with respect to race relations. I don't know that they were ever as successful, because "little" incidents kept happening, like this one a few years ago at FT Bragg. I don't believe that there's less of a "zero tolerance" attitude among the more senior leadership, at least at the "lip service" level, but in the field, I have to wonde if a go-along get-along attitude doesn't prevail. After all, an infantry unit is not a subject to the confinement and closeness of a shipboard environment 24/7 for literally months on end. Although in Iraq it's probably pretty similar, there is not much in the way of "off base" activities for most combat units beside their daily patrols for IEDs and such. So unit cohesion and morale is important there, will that be a place where the first breaks along racial lines occur, if they do as happened aboard those carriers in the early 70s?

It'll bear watching to see how the Army handles this, now that there has been some publicity about it. I'd like to think that most soldiers, if approached by a fellow soldier about joining an organization whose goals are overtly not compatible with DoD policy like some of those mentioned would decline and report the "recruiter" to his or her chain of command. Sadly, I doubt that's going to happen. Go-along/get-along is going to kick in, and the activity will continue elsewhere.

Bottom-line: are recruiters actively seeking these folks out? No, I don't think so. They are being pressured to "make goal", and their alternative to not "making goal" is probably being ripped from their current stateside tour and being sent back overseas, whether to Iraq or not, they'll be sent away from the Army version of "shore duty", and if you just got back it's a no-brainer that any warm body that keeps those PCS orders from arriving in your in-box is a good warm body.