Army Hopes Dropouts Can Fill Gaps-Opens First Prep School Aimed At Students Who Quit High School

[RamboLiberal]

Source: CBS News/AP

Austin Swarner left high school to care for his mother while she fought a losing battle with cancer. Tony Brown wanted to begin supporting himself and left two classes shy of a diploma. Haelee Holden got tired of trying to make it through school while flipping burgers until 1 a.m.

But the U.S. Army, eager to fill its ranks amid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, doesn't see them as dropouts. They are recruits who only need a GED before they're ready to begin basic training.

And so, the Army formally opens its first prep school Wednesday.

"It's academic immersion," explained Col. Jeffrey Sanderson, chief of staff at Fort Jackson, home of the Army's largest basic training school. "Our studies show that with only three out of every 10 people of military age being capable of joining the Army, we are going to have to do something different."

That includes turning six World War II-era buildings at the base into a mini-campus of spartan classrooms and barracks. Under the yearlong pilot project, classes of about 60 soldiers will enter the monthlong program every week.


Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/27/national/main4388137.shtml

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And if McCain is elected - the draft?

[Selatius]

1. If there were a terrorist attack, he could push through a draft.

That's a pretty big "if" though.

[damntexdem]

2. No, no, if you're going to pick a pocket, make sure the chump doesn't feel your hand in his pocket!

Yeah, it'll be a dickens of a school, all right. ;-)

[jmowreader]

3. What's the name of this school, Cannon Fodder High?

This sounds like Project 100,000, one of the Army's more harebrained schemes. According to General Arthur Collins' masterwork Common Sense Training,

Project 100,000 was designed to absorb into the services a number of men who did not meet the mental criteria or who had minor physical defects that would normally have been a bar to enlistment. It imposed upon the services a social rehabilitation program which detracted from their primary mission...I believe that many of the disciplinary and leadership problems in the Army during that period were due to the large number of Project 100,000 people in the Army.

[Thothmes]

4. Project 100,000 was not an army idea

McNamaras people cooked it up. Each armed service had to accept x number of mental catagory 4 enlistees. It was a disaster for each of the services.

[jmowreader]

5. The Army got the brunt of the influx

I don't have Common Sense Training with me at this second (I will look up the numbers and get them back to you this evening, if you'd like), but General Collins gave the figures for Project 100,000 enlistees--the Army got about twice as many as the other three services combined.

Whoever came up with this one versus Project 100,000 is beside the point--the point is, the Army knows what kind of people statistically make good soldiers and the kind that don't, and with this academy they're actively attempting to enlist the kind they wouldn't have spoken to ten years ago.