Hang on to your Losers... Army's Answer to Manpower Shortage By Phillip Carter and Owen West

This is Army's answer to keeping up with the manpower quotas. Keep the losers. Keep the trouble makers, gold bricks, dirt bags, skaters, and squad leaders of the don't give a damn brigade. If you live long enough you get to see everything twice. Keeping the losers was not the answer in the 70's when the Marine Corps saw the light and let go 6000 of these bad boys and it beats me how the Army now thinks that sweet talk and incentives will help with shortages. As this article states, the true "warrior class is small" but it is powerful and faithful. The tip of the spear, the warriors, need to have more attention and incentives directed towards reenlistment. The men who have the guts to go toe to toe with mad dog thugs, to preserve our cherished freedoms, deserve the best our budgets can provide not lame brain proposals recycled from the 70's round file.

"This new retention directive represents a regression by the Army, from the vaunted all-volunteer force of today back in the direction of the all-volunteer force of the 1970s, when drug use, race riots, and AWOL incidents were common among all services. The Marine Corps Historical Branch traces its own severe spiral to 'the end of the draft and the pressure of keeping up the size of the Marine Corps. In the process, a number of society's misfits had been recruited.' By 1975, the corps had so decayed that newly appointed Commandant Lewis Wilson sought permission from Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to implement a radical personnel proposal: Push the authority to discharge unworthy Marines down to the battalion level. Under the 'expeditious discharge program,' commanders quickly cut 6,000 undesirables, sending a message that reverberated throughout the military, paving the way for the subsequent military performance surge credited to President Reagan.
Now the Army intends to reverse the policy, implying that battalion commanders are not able to weigh the needs of the total force against those of their units. By the time a soldier reaches the discharge point, the officers above him have already invested a great deal of rehabilitative effort. Forcing units to keep these troops—and indeed, to take them to war—puts a very heavy rock in the rucksack of any field commander who must now balance managing these subpar performers with his mission and the needs of his unit.

It does not have to be this way. While faced with an unprecedented personnel squeeze, the military has a golden opportunity to implement structural reforms so it can better face the challenges of the 21st century.
The services must shift the manpower priority from recruiting to retention. The fact that the Navy and Air Force have consistently met their recruiting quotas in the face of a global war demonstrates that there is no shortage of young Americans willing to join the military. Shouldering a rifle in the mountains of Tora Bora or on Fallujah's streets is a different story, however. Though the Army and Marines have to recruit less than a quarter of 1 percent of the eligible population each year, they are finding that America's warrior class is small. 'There's a difference between those who want some life experience and those who want to fight,' says a Marine recruiter. 'And most of [the latter] sign up anyway.' The focus should be on retaining those who gravitate to the tip of the spear instead of coercing those more comfortable with service than soldiering."