Army; Recruiters should focus on female recruits
Chief Tango sends us a link from the Associated Press which begins telling us good idea that the Army has about recruiting and job-placement. he want to test recruits strength and endurance to determine what jobs they should have;
Prospective soldiers will be asked to run, jump, lift a weight and throw a heavy ball – all to help the Army figure out if the recruit can handle a job with high physical demands or should be directed to a more sedentary assignment.
OK, well, that makes sense, except that I probably wouldn’t have qualified to be an infantryman after the “Summer of Jonn” following high school.
The article also addresses the question on everybodys’ minds – how can the Army enlist more women;
As part of the effort, the Army will increase the number of female recruiters to better target women. The goal will be to add 1 percent each year for the next three years in order to get at least one woman at each of the Army’s more than 780 larger recruiting centers across the country.
Right now, only about 750 of the 8,800 Army and Army Reserve recruiters are women.
The head of U.S. Army Recruiting Command, Maj. Gen. Jeff Snow, told The Associated Press that adding more women as recruiters will give female recruits someone more credible to talk to about options for women in the military and how an Army career could affect married or family life.
See, that sounds sexist to me – are women the only ones concerned about married or family life in the Army, and are women the only people who know those answers? I’m pretty sure that there are male recruiters who can already answer those questions.
For those of you who aren’t already familiar with the process, many recruiters are forced to work in those positions. I’m sure there will more than a few women who won’t like being jerked out of their chosen profession to fly a desk and make cold calls to high school seniors just to make the Army look like they want more women in the ranks. That brings me to my big question – the question I’ve been asking since this whole discussion began, the question which still hasn’t been answered. How will recruiting more women, and making more women recruiters help us kill more of the enemies of democracy?
Category: Big Army
To answer your question: “How will recruiting more women, and making more women recruiters help us kill more of the enemies of democracy?”
By training women who demonstrate what it takes to help the enemy die for their country. I did my part.
The Army should focus on readiness, not social issues.
Yeah, they should. So should the rest of DoD. But they won’t until DoD gets some Adult Leadership again – e.g., leadership that takes the mission as the deadly seriously thing it is vice regarding it as some kind of social experiment.
Mission never, feels always.
That is the Obama military.
Isn’t that nice… (he comments in a very neutral tone to cover his contempt of all things USAREC and the idea that Combat Arms is somehow a Petri dish)
‘The Summer of Jonn’????? That sounds like going to the drive-in with the top down on daddy’s convertible.
Gee whiz, I spent my summers bucking hay bales onto a conveyor from the hayrack to the hayloft, at a dime a bale.
How will it help? Just make sure they’re good shots, that they make every bullet count and don’t use the ‘spray and pray’ method that seems to be so prevalent in the untrained.
“at a dime a bale.” Now, don’t take this as I’m disputing you, but:
Geez, I would have loved to have made that much for making hay while the sun shines.
Not saying it didn’t happen over on your side of the river, but on the Hoosier side (during the 1960’s) the most we ever got for baling was two cents a bale, regardless of whether you worked the baler wagon, tractor shuttle driver/unloader, or worked the hay mow.
And no, the rate didn’t increase when you worked 110 pound bales of timothy clover instead of 60 pound wheat straw bales.
A bale was a bale. The counter on the baler didn’t care how much it weighed.
Smile.
I was probably between the two of you, since I made $3/hour. I normally worked the wagon, and the barn door opening limited the height we could stack, so if I remember right, I think we fit ~100-120 bales on a wagon. I don’t remember how long it took to load a wagon, though, so I’m gonna guess it was closer to 2 cents a bale, but not under that…
I remember doing it for a nickel a bale and it seemed like a fortune worth quitting school for!
In the mid 90’s, our “crew” got $.25/bale and split it. The days when there were 4 people sucked, but the two-person days more than made up for it!
There are still a few farmers around here that use square bales, but not very many.
Yes, it was a dime a bale. The two farmers I worked for sold it to feed companies like Purina, to be made into pelleted feeds. It was usually alfalfa, up to a full section of it.
Now they use those bigroll balers everywhere. The square balers are almost all gone.
It sounds like a lot of money, but after three days of doing that and going home dusty but paid well, I was one aching mess. But I at least had money for horse feed, bedding and hay for my own horse.
Aha, well, now custom feed alfalfa is a whole different price wise ballgame from the run of the mill baling that I was accustomed to. If the farmers knew you were doing it to support your horses, they may have bumped up the going rate a little.
Usually around a hundred bales to a wagon, elapsed time for building a wagon was roughly an hour and 15 minutes, 10 or 12 wagons a day (from dew burn-off to dew onset), two days work roughly 2500-2600 bales, etc. Those numbers add up after a while.
But when you’re in your teens and lean and mean, numbers don’t mean nuthin. Just the cold hard spot cash at the end of the job was what counted.
You guys are so funny, we all know that women are unable to understand things that men tell them so they must have female recruiters in order for them to understand what’s being said to them.
That’s not at all sexist anymore than it’s racist when black recruits only wish talk with black recruiters.
Remember it’s only sexist or racist when it’s being done by white males, any other gender or race is simply exercising their right to freely associate with others like them. White men oppress everyone, blacks and women can’t be racist or sexist because they don’t have any power in our society.
Once you understand the advantage of your male white privilege you’ll be able to follow along much easier and with far less proctoring….
/sarc — I only wish I hadn’t read similar idiotic tripe written by what I believe to be serious people, but clearly fucking clueless.
So what I think you’re saying because I am a white,heterosexual American-born male no matter what I say or do I am; man-splaining, patronizing, demeaning, oppressing, disenfranchising, alienating, etc. all from a place of ignorance? Geez, I clearly have a lot of work to do to undo the injustice my existence has reaped upon the world.
/tsar bomb of sarc detonated with positive effects on target
Yes, there are entire departments at some of our nation’s more prestigious universities dedicated to explaining how you and I are the real reason the world is so awful.
Because I’m a full time student and work nearly full time I average 5-6 hours of sleep a night and I don’t say I wake exactly well rested.
Working hypothesis: I must be going full Tyler Durden at night and attending Klan, No Ma’am, and Goldman Sachs meetings/rallies.
My inner white male devil is strong.
Or, just ask he who must not be named.
Army will need more daycare for the single mommas with multiple baby daddies.
Yep.
Right around deployment time.
I saw it.
GPAC, Camp Lejeune around 2004. So many pregnant WMs working there when I checked in I thought I entered the twilight zone.
I got to be a HQ PSG in a Transportation Company once upon a time. I finally had to tell the 1SG one day that I didn’t feel qualified for the position. When he asked why I told him I wasn’t an OB/GYN doctor.
Someone needs to kick the shit out of the Good Idea Fairy.
YMMV.
LIKE++
No. Someone needs to (1) catch that worthless entity; (2) put it in a cage; (3) wrap the cage with chain, then padlock the chains and cage tightly shut with multiple padlocks; (4) weld the cylinder on the padlocks shut; (5) crate up the whole mess; (6) mark the cage “Do not open until 2125”; and then (7) ship the crate to Adak or Shemya in the Aleutians. Or maybe Antarctica.
Why not chain it to some cinder blocks and deep six it out in the Pacific Ocean say, in the Mariana trench?
“I’m sure there will more than a few women who won’t like being jerked out of their chosen profession to fly a desk”
—-
As I was told during a bitch session:
“At ease. I didn’t like being jerked out of xxxx and being sent to Vietnam. Now suck it up and move out smartly. And look up selfless service along the way.”
Deploying is one thing, being forced out of your MOS to be a glorified salesperson who’s livelihood literally depends on selling x number of kids every month is an entirely different ballgame. As how I know.
…When I had the misfortune of serving as a USAF Recruiter (Akron, OH ’89-’93), My Beloved Service regularly told us we need more (INSERT ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX HERE). It didn’t work, it NEVER worked. The target population rarely, if ever, had the combination of interest, motivation, and qualifications the USAF wanted. If they did, they were without exception divas who demanded preferential treatment and usually ended up leaving USAF DEP and going to another service.
They were especially psychotic regarding minority applicants, bad enough that I know of at least one RS here in the Southeast that ordered recruiters to ‘correct mistakes in paperwork’ (TRANSLATION: falsify the applications) so that people were coming in under questionable conditions…and one recruiter who was taken to a GCM for ‘disobeying a direct order’ when he refused to do so. (Acquitted in what may have been the shortest GCM on record, but his career was done.)
All this does – no more, and no less – instills an attitude in the recruiters to either cheat or give the hell up. It never does the service or this country any good.
Mike
It is a proven statistic with females in your DEP: if you want to ship three, DEP six. Very needy and high maintenance requiring time you just don’t have for them. (I hit the report button by accident, move it a bit to the right please?)
Okay, honey, I’ll volunteer.
I’m 70, but I do have time in rank. Think they’ll take me just to make a quote? (Falls off chair laughing.)
“I’d like to have two armies: one for display with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering Generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their General’s bowel movements or their Colonel’s piles, an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country. The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.”
― Jean Lartéguy
“The Centurions”. Great book. I read it about 5 years after it was published,not long before I had the pleasure of walking “The Street Without Joy” myself. One of the few books I have ever read that gave me a real feeling of deja vu.
I have a real problem with the idea that any job for a soldier is “sedentary”, especially an enlisted soldier. When I went back on active duty in 1986 I enlisted to be a 96B, Intelligence Analyst. Sounds pretty sedentary, right? I mean, sitting in an office, analyzing stuff, writing reports, giving briefings, etc, right? Yeah, well, that ignores the realities of military life. When you go to the field, who sets up the big 5 ton expandable vans and covers them with heavy, cumbersome camouflage nets? Who loads all the tents, personal gear and equipment into the trucks when you move from place to place? (and our doctrine as the DTOC was to “jump” the TOC every 3 – 4 days, i.e. move to a different location because our electronic signature was so high it would have been easy for the Commies to locate us.) The military doesn’t have “coolies” or porters – the military has enlisted personnel and they’re the ones who do all that heavy lifting. I swear I spent the first 2 years of that enlistment mostly just carrying heavy things from one place to another – I felt like I was preparing for a career working for a moving company. Even in garrison there are almost always things that need to be moved, lifted, or carried. Post details, range details, etc etc. When I lived in the barracks in Germany I remember one morning at formation the First Sergeant stated that there were about 100 wall lockers – weighing probably close to 100 lbs each – that needed to be moved from the basement of the barracks up to the top floor. Franco-Prussian-war-era barracks don’t have elevators, so guess who got to move those lockers? When I was at Fort Lewis in 1990, our unit moved from North Fort (which at that time was mostly wooden WWII barracks) over to main post. Again, would you like to guess who it was that actually loaded all that stuff onto trucks, drove those trucks across post, and then unloaded them and carried that stuff up 1 or… Read more »
Amen. People thought the heaviest piece of gear we’d ever lift would be a Fluke.
Uh, no.
“The military doesn’t have “coolies” or porters”
LOL. That’s the 11X MOS. You think the Army lets all that labor sit idly by when there was work to be done? When we didn’t train we were helping someone else train or cleaning up after them. My first taste of Germany was Range 42 (a tank range) at Grafenwoehr. I spent an entire year at Ft. Benning “supporting” everyone else.
Ah, good times.
In the Army I grew up in, Coolies and Porters were known as 57A’s – Duty Soldier.
57A was also the Duty MOS assigned to a Prisoner once your ass got dragged off to the Post Stockade.
Say Hello, Tough Monkey.
There are a few elements to this. First, this is not new- it is a DACOWITS finding from a few years ago. For years they have been pressuring all of the services to have more female recruiters.
The problem is that the qualifications for recruiters are as stringent as the qualifications for Drill Sergeants, which is a pretty high standard.
Of course, these are the same NCOs that we need out in the operational force as well.
This is a problem for men as well, but because of the demographics (only about 15% of the force is women), it is a much bigger problem.
WRT ‘sedentary’ MOSs, the problem is that we have combined MOSs over the years and haven’t done it very wisely. For instance, we have 3 kinds of howitzer but one kind of 13B. We have 3-5 types of Infantry battalion (depending on how you count- are airborne/air assault units different enough from IBCTs to be counted as different?) but we have one 11B.
Another stark difference is in 68Ws, who could serve as line medics or in a TMC somewhere, and some MI jobs that could work in a cubicle farm somewhere or be walking with the infantry in Afghanistan carrying 50 extra pounds of gear. All one MOS.
The great equalizer is Warrior Tasks and Battle Drills, AKA Common Tasks, which the Army is not doing a good job of training to standard.
I remember when they started that stupid DACOWITS nonsense. I think it was back in the early to mid-80s. I saw the handwriting on the wall then.
And of course it’s impossible that the real issue could be that the military is an inherently physically demanding profession where strength and endurance are a requirement.
Yes, that was sarcasm.
“to help the Army figure out if the recruit can handle a job with high physical demands or should be directed to a more sedentary assignment.”
I always thought that the function of BCT & AIT was to prepare the recruit for those high physical demands. Evidently the Army now expects the prospective recruits to train themselves before enlisting.
THAT or they expect their Permanent Party Unit to finish their AIT and it’s even worse with cherry 2LT’s.
I was Benning at 2-29 IN as an instructor in the 09-11 time frame. Via the ex- I found myself in the same social circle as a BCT company commander (b/c I found it beyond awkward we stuck to work talk). He told me that the millennials as a cohort as too soft to be trained right off the bat. He said there was a study saying that the low activity/sedentary lifestyle, shit nutrition and consumption of sugary energy drinks is causing low bone density. At 30th AG the little fuckers walk for the first couple weeks to make sure their bones can handle further training.
Now, do you think for one goddamn moment this is a problem elsewhere? I doubt it…
To quote one of the most famous people in human history “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks”.
Just as a little issue about the endurance of the Republic, if some problem makes our technological advantage moot, how the fuck are these lipdick soft boned losers going to hump to victory?
All I know is I first did three years of AD in the early 90’s and came back in after a nine year break in service into the NG where I often left 20-somethings eating my dust on ruck marched and PT runs, and cherry 2LT’s (non-prior service ones)? HO-LEE SHEEP SHIT, a PV2 fresh out of Basic and AIT could zero a rifle and qualify ten times faster! We had one cherry 2LT that had tears in his eyes after a “GODDAMMIT, LT!” from more than one of us grumpy, grizzled Old School NCO’s, after that I knew how my AD Platoon Sergeant was feeling when we heard him as he looked at the PL and yelled, “GAWDAMMIT SIR, I’ll bring you the paperwork when it needs to be signed and in the meantime I’ll run MY PLATOON the way it needs to be!”. Give me an Ossifer that’s prior enlisted any time, they don’t need to have their hands held during break-in time!
Craigslist Ad:
Women wanted for service…Seeking women, aged 17-34. International travel, male attention guaranteed (regardless of appearance!) Lesbians welcome. We provide meals, housing, and clothing, including footwear. Must be submissive, willing to take orders, and to undergo various types of training. If interested, please call 1-703-521-0271 and ask for an appointment.
I called that number and someone named “Chevy” answered it.
It’s the nail salon at the Pentagon. Truly.
My daughter leaves for recruiting school next month. Ill ask her
No one is asking the most important question: will increasing the number of female recruiters help fight climate change? I’m sure this initiative complies with DoD Instruction 4715.21, Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience (I did not make that up).
Yes,
Female recruiters will well in that regard.
The biggest issue addressed will be “mass flatulence”.
If two or more male recruiters are in the office they will often have a fart off when one of them breaks wind.
With females prtesent they arent as open, and females tend to not pass gas in front of co workers.
There will be a “safe space” now in recruiters offices instead of potentional “ass eruption zones”
So glad our military is now devolving into tribalism as policy…..
Our military is being destroyed from within.
No, just “fundamentally transformed” as someone promised back in 2008.
If I had come of age 20 or so years ago, I suppose I would be on board with all of the shit being shoveled, from gay marriage, to women in combat, to legal grass, to abortion on demand, to thought crimes, to presidential candidates trying to out-commie one another, and, not to be forgotten, to transgenders being welcomed by at least one military service, with the rest to follow. But I did not and all of this stuff is alien and repugnant to me. Yeah, I’ll be dead soon enough so my suffering all of this crazy bullshit will end sooner than later. Thank God.
You mean they haven’t been FAIRLY [by percentage of women in the army] hitting female sergeants to be a recruiter? Why that’s sexist and keeping them from advancing! Like Drill Sergeant, one of those “special assignments” that supposedly help you get promoted- why aren’t they mandating females to recruiting in higher numbers NORMALLY? Hell, it’s a great assignment to get pregnant in, since you ain’t deploying anyway for 3 years ! !
Recruiting duty IS like being deployed. It’s common knowledge that 90+ hour work weeks for 3 years straight is a recipe for divorce, which happens often. I remember staying up long nights talking with the other guy I worked with how we wish we were back in Iraq because it was less stressful.
As a former Marine recruiter, I’m guessing the recruiting commands probably don’t want more female recruiters anyway. All of the horror stories people hear about recruiting duty – making recruiters run 3 milers in their dress shoes, making them take a 3 hour drive to HQ to get bitched at for missing phone call/interview/contract quotas and driving back to the station to work until midnight, making them canvass WalMart at 1 in the morning only to come back at work by 7:30 – these are all true and ongoing. Commands can’t treat female recruiters like this because they’ll bitch and raise a huge Equal Opportunity shitstorm, thereby negatively affecting the mission and missing quotas to keep our military at 100% required manpower. Anybody who says otherwise has never been dragged kicking and screaming to recruiting duty much less served in the military.