Bob McCarty Writes

Army recruiters face an uphill battle when it comes to meeting or exceeding their goals in 2008, according to an Associated Press report this morning:

The Army began its recruiting year Oct. 1 with fewer signed up for basic training than in any year since it became an all-volunteer service in 1973, a top general said Wednesday.

Gen. William S. Wallace, whose duties as commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command include management of recruiting, told reporters at the Pentagon that the historic dip will make it harder to achieve the full-year recruiting goal — after just barely reaching it in the year ended Sept. 30.

In the article, writer Robert Burns mentions two key factors that combine to make meeting the Army’s recruiting goals difficult:

The Army’s decision to grow its active-duty force by several thousand soldiers a year in order to relieve strain on war-weary troops; and

The decline in what the Army calls its delayed entry pool, which is the group of enlistees who have signed contracts to join the Army but want to wait before shipping off to basic training.

Nowhere in the 17-paragraph, 642-word article, however, does Burns mention — directly or indirectly — the possibility that many young people of prime recruiting age (17 to 25) shy away from military service because of what they read/see/hear about the war via anti-victory liberals in the news media and in Washington, D.C.

Just out of high school, wet behind the ears and weighing his options, a young man might come across an article in TIME Magazine that leads off with this “horrible discovery”:

The horrible discovery in Diyala province Monday was disturbing even by the standards of Iraq’s running sectarian violence. Iraqi police said they found 20 decapitated bodies dumped near a police station west of Baquba, the capital of Diyala province. That same day a suicide bomber on a bicycle careened into a Baquba police station, killing 29.

If that young man doesn’t get the chance to read Gateway Pundit’s piece that proves the TIME article to be completely false, he might have second thoughts about signing up to serve in a place where such bad things happen.

Or if that young man watched God’s Warriors, the CNN special produced by Christiane Amanpour, without reading Newsbusters’ coverage of the the documentary that “vilified critics of Islamic fundamentalism in the West,” he might think Christians were the bad guys and have second thoughts about going to fight against Amanpour’s poor fellow Muslims.

And, finally, if that young man listened only to “The War is Lost” rants of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he might think we had indeed lost the war — and who wants to join an Army that just lost a war, right? To put him on the right track, I would recommend he read the work of Michael Yon, a highly-respected combat blogger who reports today that Al Qaeda is beaten in Iraq.