I've heard several folks making a big deal about this.
The US Army defended its plan yesterday to mobilize involuntarily 5,600 retired or discharged soldiers as nothing "new or unusual," but critics said it undermines the concept of an all-volunteer military.
The soldiers -- about 300 of whom come from New England -- will be summoned from the Individual Ready Reserve, a seldom-tapped pool of 111,000 people who remain eligible to be called to active duty for eight years after completing their voluntary Army service commitment.
I didn't think it was possible for a reporter to get so many things wrong in such a small space. Then again, it is reuters.
The IRR is made up of volunteers who have left active duty prior to their End of Active Obligated Service (EAOS). All enlistments are for 8 years, split between active dute and Individual Ready Reserve (IRR). Typically, an enlistee will serve 4-6 years active, with the remainder of his time in the IRR. The IRR is in a non drilling status, but subject to recall. IRR status does NOT extend for 8 years past your discharge, but 8 years from your induction date. As for retirees, you can retire from the military after 30 years service, however, you are allowed to apply for early retirement after 20 years, provided you spend 10 years in the IRR, again, subject to recall.
Every soldier, sailer, airman, and marine knows this on the day they sign up. It's spelled out in the contract, and explained in detail during the recruitment process. In fact, and I pulled my papers out of the file to be sure, you have to initial on the contract that you've read and understand this policy.
Rand Beers, national security adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, said: "The fact is that this involuntary call-up is a direct result of the Bush administration's diplomatic failure to get real international help in Iraq." Kerry has called the stop-loss order a "backdoor draft."
It seems to me that if we can't handle what some like to call a third rate military power by ourselves, perhaps our military is too damn small. And which administration do we hold responsible for that, Mr Kerry?
"These are people who used to be soldiers and no longer are," Bacevich said of those called from the Individual Ready Reserve. "The informal contract -- the one as understood by soldiers regardless of what they actually signed -- is that I have volunteered for a certain period of time. And once that time is up, then the choice returns to me to decide either to continue my service or to opt out. What the Bush administration is doing is just shredding that informal contract."Bacevich said current service members may feel as though they have been treated unfairly and potential volunteers may have second thoughts
This is complete and utter bull. When I enlisted, just like every other guy going in, I knew it was for a total of 8 years. I also knew that, in the event of conflict, I could be held beyond my enlistment. That was the contract I signed, not some bogus "informal contract."
And I love the worry Bacevich tries to inject about the impact on retention and recruitment. Obviously, he hasn't been paying attention to recruitment and re-enlistment rates, which are easily exceeding the established targets.
So, here's an article in the mainstream press, sent out by a major news agency, that I know from personal experience contains grevious errors in fact. Combined with those errors is an evident analytical bias that quotes two critics, one from the Kerry's campaign, without getting a response from the military.
Is it any wonder that more and more people are turning away from the mainstream media? Here's what's going on.
In the past, folks who knew the facts had no voice to correct media distortions. A newspaper could publish a crap piece like this, and those that know it for crap had no way of letting the rest of us know it was crap, and giving us the correct information. Now, with the internet, and persoanl web pages/blogs, we can find out what's real and what's crap directly from the folks who know. I guarantee I'm not the only vet who's posted about the mistakes in this story, and even though I onlu have a few hundred readers, all the vets together have thousands of readers. The correct information will get out there to a wide audience.
The next time, it might be something I know nothing about, but someone somewhere in the blogosphere will know and will post it. Again, the correct information gets out to a wide audience. As this process continues, that audience gets a clearer picture of just how inept major media has become at getting the story straight, and will continue to hold it in lower and lower regard.
How can you trust a news organization which is repeatedly caught in lies and mistakes?
Posted by Rich at July 1, 2004 12:19 PM | TrackBackWith any luck, maybe we could callup Kerry back into service and put him on the front lines. A bot of reality may finally shock him into some semblance of common sense.
Posted by: DocB on July 2, 2004 9:19 PMIn March of 1970 Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was on trial in New Haven Conn for allegedly ordering the murder of a police informant . He had earlier been separated out from the conspiracy trial of a number of radicals accused of organizing criminal violence in the protests associated with the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Party convention, because he kept shouting obscenities at the judge. I was a student at Yale at the time, increasingly freaked out by the chaotic extremism from both ends of the political spectrum.
In support of Bobby Seale, the other "Chicago 8" defendants called for massive demonstrations on the New Haven Green to protest Seale's trial and imprisonment. Posters were put up in cities up and down the Atlantic seaboard calling for a hundred thousand "freaks" to trash New Haven and Yale, because of its symbolic association with the power structure of the oppressor.
Hearing about the gathering storm, a groundswell of students effectively shut down the university for the targeted two week period, in a strike that was UTTERLY mis-understood and mis-reported by the media. It was at its core a defensive move meant to make the University less of a target, and only minimally to question the legitimacy of the trial. The strike overlapped the general uproar over Nixon’s “Parrot’s Beak Incursion” into neutral Cambodia, which accounts for some of the media’s sloppiness.
Experiencing tumultuous and searing events, then seeing the absurdly innacurate reporting of those events by the most prestigious news organizations of our culture, I was made acutely aware of how little you can trust the media. Even when they get it right, it's usually unintentional.
That was the single most important idea I learned in five years at Yale. It had the effect of making me determined to go out and study things from a wide variety of sources, to be reluctant to accept absolute assertions at face value, and to place high value on the examination of alternate viewpoints.
This is the beauty of the internet, electronic samizdat, of blogs, of drudgereport.com. It's been said that a fundamental idea of information theory is that the importance of a bit of information is inversely proportional to its likelihood. Meaning that as more some report conflicts with what you comfortably believe, so more you need to pay attention and not just dismiss it.
Too bad the French Generals at the beginning of World War I didn't consider that.
(Hmmm. Come to think of it, too bad the French Generals at the beginning of World War *TWO* didn't consider the wisdom of that.)
Poor Mr. Honorable Senator Kerry seems to be assuming no one will check up on his distortions and mis-statements, but he’s managed to piss off even certain major network news anchors by his attempts to re-invent some of his youthful antics which had been well documented by his own arrangement.
Amazing how the media has latched on to the whopping 5-6k callup. The headlines make it sound as if we are recalling tens of thousands of 60 yr old men.
Posted by: Justin on July 4, 2004 2:15 PM