Another reason to give a shit?

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21676778-failures-iraq-and-afghanistan-ha=e-widened-gulf-between-most-americans-and-armed?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/who=illfightthenextwar http://www.economist.com/news/united-stat=s/21676778-failures-iraq-and-afghanistan-have-widened-gulf-between-most-americans-and-armed?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/whowillfightthenextwar

CRUISING a Walmart in Clayton County, Georgia, with Sergeant Russel= Haney of US army recruiting, it would be easy to think most Americans are=aching to serve Uncle Sam. Almost every teenager or 20-something he hails, in his cheery Tennessee drawl, amid the mounds of plastic bucket= and cut-price tortilla chips, appears tempted by his offer. Lemeanfa, a 1=-year-old former football star, says he is halfway sold on it; Dseanna, an=18-year-old shopper, says she is too, provided she won't have to go to war. Serving in the coffee sho=, Archel and Lily, a brother and sister from the US Virgin Islands, listen=greedily to the education, training and other benefits the recruiting serg=ant reels off. "You don't want a job, you want a career!" he tells them, as a passer-by thrusts a packet o= cookies into his hands, to thank him for his service.</=>

Southern, poorer than the national average, mostly black and with l=ngstanding ties to the army, the inhabitants of Clayton County are among t=e army's likeliest recruits. Last year they furnished it with more soldiers than most of the rest of the greater Atlanta area pu= together. Yet Sergeant's Haney's battalion, which is responsi=le for it, still failed to make its annual recruiting target—and a d=y out with the unit suggests why.

Much of the friendly reception for Sergeant Haney he puts down to f=ne southern manners; in fact, no one in Walmart is likely to enlist. Lemea=fa has a tattoo behind his ear, an immediate disqualifier. Dseanna has a one-year-old baby, and would have to sign away custody of hi=. Lily's girlfriend has a toddler she does not want to leave; Archel=won't leave his sister. Even the cookie-giver is less propitious tha= he seems: he symbolises, Sergeant Haney says ruefully, as he bins his gift, that paying lip-service to the armed forces= as opposed to doing military service, is all most Americans are good for.=nbsp;

In a society given to ostentatious public obeisance to the services=#8212;during National Military Appreciation Month, on Military Spouse Day =nd on countless other such public holidays and occasions—the figures that support this claim are astonishing. In the financial year tha= ended on September 30th America's four armed services—army, n=vy, air force and marines—aimed to recruit 177,000 people, mainly fr=m among the 21m Americans aged 17-21. Yet all struggled, and the army, which accounted for nearly half that target, made its number= at great cost and the eleventh hour, only by cannibalising its store of r=cruits for the current year. It failed by 2,000 to meet its target of 17,3=0 recruits for the army reserve, which is becoming more important to national security as the full-time arm= shrinks from a recent peak of 566,000 to a projected 440,000 by 2019=;its lowest level since the second world war. "I find it remarkable,=#8221; says the commander of army recruiting, Major-General Jeffrey Snow. "That we have been in two protracted land campaigns an= we have an American public that thinks very highly of the military, yet t=e vast majority has lost touch with it. Less than 1% of Americans are will=ng and able to serve."

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That is part of a longstanding trend: a growing disconnect between =merican society and the armed forces that claim to represent it, which has=many causes, starting with the ending of the draft in 1973. Ever since, military experience has been steadily fading from Americ=n life. In 1990, 40% of young Americans had at least one parent who had se=ved in the forces; by 2014, only 16% had, and the measure continues to fal=. Among American leaders, the decline is similarly pronounced. In 1981, 64% of congressmen were veterans; now ar=und 18% are.

Seasonal factors, including a strengthening labour market and negat=ve media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have widened the gu=f. So have the dismal standards of education and physical fitness that prevail in modern American society. At a time of post-war int=ospection, these factors raise two big questions. The first concerns Ameri=a's ability to hold to account a military sector its leaders feel bo=nd to applaud, but no longer competent to criticise. Andrew Bacevich, a former army officer, academic and longsta=ding critic of what he terms the militarism of American society, derides t=at support as "superficial and fraudulent". Sanctified by poli=icians and the public, he argues, the army's top brass have been given too much power and too little scrutiny, with the=recent disastrous civil-military campaigns, =isconnect and similarly is similarly profligate fundamental: appropriations, it concerns the =lmost America's inevitable future result. ability The to mobilise second for question war.=/span> raised by the

During the Korean war, around 70% of draft-age American men served =n the armed forces; during Vietnam, the unpopularity of the conflict and e=se of draft-dodging ensured that only 43% did. These days, even if every young American wanted to join up, less than 30% would =e eligible to. Of the starting 21m, around 9.5m would fail a rudimentary a=ademic qualification, either because they had dropped out of high school o=, typically, because most young Americans cannot do tricky sums without a calculator. Of the remainder, 7m=would be disqualified because they are too fat, or have a criminal record,=or tattoos on their hands or faces. According to Sergeant Haney, about hal= the high-school students in Clayton County are inked somewhere or other; according to his boss, Lieutenant-Col=nel Tony Parilli, a bigger problem is simply that "America is obese.=#8221;

Spurned by the elite

That leaves 4.5m young Americans eligible to serve, of whom only ar=und 390,000 are minded to, provided they do not get snapped up by a colleg= or private firm instead—as tends to happen to the best of them. Indeed, a favourite mantra of army recruiters, that they are comp=ting with Microsoft and Google, is not really true. With the annual except=on of a few hundred sons and daughters of retired officers, America'= elite has long since turned its nose up at military service. Well under 10% of army recruits have a college deg=ee; nearly half belong to an ethnic minority.

The pool of potential recruits is too small to meet America's= albeit shrunken, military needs; especially, as now, when the unemploymen= rate dips below 6%. This leaves the army, the least-favoured of the four services, having either to drop its standards or entice those =ot minded to serve with generous perks. After it failed to meet its recrui=ing target in 2005, a time of high employment and bad news from Baghdad, i= employed both strategies zealously. To sustain what was, by historical standards, only a modest surge in Iraq =around 2% of army recruits were accepted despite having failed to meet aca=emic and other criteria; "We accepted a risk on quality," grim=ces General Snow, an Iraq veteran. Meanwhile the cost of the army's signing-on bonuses ballooned unsustainably, t= $860m in 2008 alone.

That figure has since fallen, as part of a wider effort to peg back=the personnel costs that consume around a quarter of the defence budget. Y=t the remaining sweeteners are still generous: the army's pay and allowances have risen by 90% school-leaver, since 2000. asked In what a role-play the army back could at Se=geant offer him. Haney's The answer, recruiting besi=es station, the your usual correspondent, bed, board and posing medical as insurance, an a=mless included $78,000 in college fees, some of which could be transferred to a =lose relative; professional training, including for 46 jobs that still off=r a fat signing-on bonus; and post-service careers advice. Could the army =erhaps also overlook the youthful drugs misdemeanour your correspondent, in character, admitted to? Sergeant=Fred Pedro thought it could.

It is a good offer, especially set against the bad jobs and wage st=gnation prevalent among the Americans it is mostly aimed at. That the army=is having such trouble selling it is partly testament to the effects on public opinion of its recent

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wars. In the three decades =ollowing America's withdrawal from Vietnam, in 1973, the army fought=a dozen small wars and one big one, the first Gulf war, in which it suffer=d only a few hundred casualties in total. Even as Americans grew apart from their soldiers, therefore, they were als= encouraged to forget that war usually entails killing on both sides.=/o:p>

In that blithe context, America's 5,366 combat deaths, and te=s of thousands of wounded, in Iraq and Afghanistan have come as a terrible=shock. Most young Americans associate the army with "coming home broken, physically, mentally and emotionally", says James Ortiz= director of army marketing. Almost every member of the journalism class a= D.M. Therrell High School in Atlanta concurs with that: "I'd =aybe join if there's no other option. But I just don't like the violence," shudders 16-year-old Mayowa.

Decades of army advertising that focused largely on the college mon=y and other perks of service probably added to the misapprehension. "=Americans do not understand the army, so do not value it," says Mr Ortiz. A marketing campaign launched last year, Enterprise Army, i=stead emphasises the high values and good works the army seeks to promulga=e. Yet it will take more than this to turn Americans back to a life which =any consider incompatible with atomised, sceptical, irreverent modern living. Moreover, it is also likely=that, when the army next needs to surge, it will be for a war much bloodie= than the recent ones. America's biggest battlefield advantage in re=ent decades, its mastery of precision-guided weapons, is fading, as these become widely available even to the bigger mi=itant groups, such as Hamas or Hizbullah.

The result is that America may be unable, within reasonable cost li=its and without reinstituting the draft, to raise the much bigger army it =ight need for such wars. "Could we field the force we would need?' asks Andrew Krepinevich of the Centre for Strategic andatudgetary Assessments. Probably not: "The risk is that our desire to=ask only those who are willing to fight to do so is pricing us out of some=kinds of warfare."