The Iwo Jima memorial is a testament to how well standards in our military have worked in the past. The story behind the memorial illustrates how, through all adversity and against all odds, we of the United States military excel and succeed. Why? We are the best that our country has to offer. What if something changed and we were no longer the best? What if we could not get the best that the country has to offer for whatever reasons, and we were still required to continue growing? Sadly, this is not a what-if situation; this is in fact the very situation that we, as a nation, find ourselves in today. We are running out of able-bodied individuals to fight our wars, so we turn to anyone else who has a pulse.
We are killing our service members at a dangerous rate, and a small portion of these deaths can be alleviated and prevented by tightening our standards of enlistment once again. If we can tighten our standards once again we will be able to improve our chances in the current war and all other wars to come. Finding enough soldiers to fill all of our armed services is not a hard task to accomplish. Finding enough quality soldiers is an absolutely different battle though.
Today all of the branches have their very own standards which led the branches to make individual names for themselves in various ways. The Marine Corps is the most physical, most disciplined, rowdy, slightly less than intelligent, group of servicemen and women that we have today. The Marine Corps is also grossly under-funded, very highly trained, and vastly under-utilized. With the Marine Corps, and the other branches, trying to grow in size at a constant rate it is being forced to scoop lower and lower into the American enlistment pool until practically scraping the bottom.
The Marine Corps is now taking individuals who require waivers for their Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB. This is a test that measures ones abilities in basics such as math and reading, then continuing on to test you on vocational abilities relating to electricity, mechanics, and assembly. Differing among each branch, the Marine Corps requires you to pass it with at least a thirty-two in order to enlist with no waiver. The national average is between forty and fifty, so you have to be brain-dead to fail this test. If you were to fail this test, how should I expect you to problem solve, read a mission order, or assemble a stretcher when we are deployed together?
As stated before, the Marine Corps has historically been the most physically fit service of them all. In order to attain a perfect score on their semi-annual physical fitness test individual Marines must run 3 miles in 18 minutes or less, do 20 dead hand pull-ups, and complete 100 crunches in 2 minutes. Individual who do not pass are placed in remedial physical training, along with possibly being forced out of the Marine Corps. However, we are now running so low on manpower that we are keeping everyone that we can, even if we would have kicked them out before. We enlist people that we know will not be able to make it physically, just to fill in our numbers. Recruiters do not realize what exactly it is they are doing when they enlist an overweight corpsman, known as a medic in the Army. What they do not realize is how quickly that corpsman will be deployed with a group of Marines whose lives depend on that corpsman’s physical fitness.
There are those that would claim that lowering our standards enables us to place these overweight Marines in positions that are not on the frontline. These same critics would argue that intelligence is not required in an infantry job. If we must lower our standards then yes, we can place the overweight Marines in administrative jobs. I ask you this though, is that fair to the Marines that are actually doing the fighting? Critics must also realize that as much as we attempt to keep certain people off of the frontlines, all Marines will eventually be there. All Marines are basic riflemen before they are anything else.
I can understand the reason that the military has had to lower its standards, but that does not mean that I agree with it. Fighting two different wars at the same time has stretched our resources as thin as they can possibly go. The many deployments have tired out our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines to the point that they no longer wish to stay in the military as they once did. The friends, families, and other loved ones of our bravest are suffering along with them.
Imagine if you will, a Marine sergeant who has a 5 year old son, Justin. The father, Mark, is the epitome of the archetype of a Marine, except for one thing. In his younger years Mark made a mistake in his choice of a wife. The divorce led to him becoming a single father who has full custody of his son. All together he has racked up 36 months of deployment and around 13 months of training for those deployments. Justin is 60 months old and Mark has been gone a total of about 49 months. How fair is this to our fellow Americans? How fair is this to Justin ? Is it any fairer to Justin to place the life of his father in jeopardy by placing him with a second rate Marine who may have needed 12 different waivers to enlist?
We see these simple truths and hopefully we realize that it is an unnecessary risk that we take with our service member’s lives. These are the very people who have voluntarily sacraficed to go overseas and secure our freedoms for us as we sit idly by. We should all feel it necessary to go and talk to our local recruiters and ensure that they are only taking individuals who meet the standards of enlistment as they once were. We owe it to ourselves to make sure that we only have the best of the best guarding our shores here in America and all of our interests in the rest of the world.
References
Zoellick, R. (2008, August 22). Editorial: The Key to Rebuilding Afghanistan. The Washington Post. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/BANCOMUNDIAL/NEWSSPANISH/0,,contentMDK:21880014~menuPK:3746755~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:1074568,00.html
Wikipedia. Robert Zoellick. Retrieved February 11, 2010,
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