USA: Fighting to Attract Soldiers
10 minutes, 2005
Ref: 462

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We examine West Point academy where the US trains the soldiers going to Iraq but has faced the problem of a 10 per cent decrease in recruitment over the last year. They are the chosen ones. America's military elite! Students at West Point, would be leaders of the most powerful fighting force the world has ever seen. Following here in the footsteps of legendary generals; Eisenhower, Patton, Macarthur, Schwarzkopf. But this generation is preparing for a very different kind of war. For though just a short drive north of New York, Iraq feels ominously close. Many of last year's graduates are already there. Most of this year's class of 900 will follow them. And so fun and games on the playing fields of West Point soon to become a distant memory. This place has been preparing Americans for battle since 1802. But with two campaigns in the last four years. In Iraq and Afghanistan, and neither of them over yet, West Point is now back on a war footing, more so than at any time since Vietnam. Still the same strict exercise regime there's always been. But traditional tank battle practice is now far less important than guerrilla warfare tactics, central to the curriculum for the first time since Vietnam. After Abu Ghraib, treatment of detainees now studied by all 4000 students. And the most popular of seven foreign languages on offer? Arabic. But in a country divided over the rationale for war, so it seems are the families of West Point's student body and that poses a problem for West Point's recruiters who admit there's been a drop of around 10% in student applications over the last year. And so the army's latest recruitment campaign not targeting the young directly but their parents instead. Nearly two thirds of last year's army intake came from America's poorest areas, a trend if anything on the rise. Still the usual drug tests but the ordinary ranks are now so stretched that the army's taking on those with the lowest academic pass rates in a decade. Expanding benefits yes, but lowering educational standards, one recruit we met was turned down every year for the last four till they lowered the bar to let him in. Private Ozuna won't make it here to West Point, breeding ground for a quarter of America's officer class. But amid the worst army recruitment crisis since the 70s, the teachers are beginning to worry. But though the army wants America's brightest, many are spurning the offer.