Hey Kid. Wanna See My Gun?

Over hill, over dale as we hit the George Orwell Memorial Don't Look Over There Just Listen Photo Of The Day:



We're not sure why so much ink has been spilled over the army not being able to meet its recruiting goals. Sure there are the cool uniforms and patches, but having to buy your own bullet proof vest really cuts into the old college fund. Yeah, the government will help you go to school when you get back, or at least when whatever pieces of you that are left get back, but you'd better not get sick until you die. That is if you didn't die in the first place, which is much more considerate of you from the government's point of view.

Now, before you accuse us of getting all up in the Army's grill and all, we just want to say that we're sympathetic to the obstacles recruiters face when the kids they are trying to recruit are smarter than they are and when the mothers of the kids they are trying to kidnap...er...recruit get all medieval about protecting their sons.

So what's a poor army to do except set their sights a little lower. Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey announced that the Army would allow up to 4% of its recruiting class to be Category IV recruits — those who scored between the 16th and 30th percentile in the battery of aptitude tests that the Defense Department gives to all potential military personnel.

For those of you watching at home that means that these are the people who scored lower than 70 to 84 percent of those taking the aptitude test. "Look if you can see reasonably well and bend your index finger we can make it work," said Harvey. "Oh, and duck. You have to be able to duck too."

Harvey insisted that by lowering standards the Army was not lowering standards but merely conforming to Department of Defense guidelines that lowered standards. "They lowered standards first. We're just playing catch up here."

Before being admitted into the military, a potential recruit takes a group of tests known as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. "This is no cakewalk," Harvey said. "We give the recruits pencils, but we don't sharpen them first. They have to figure out which end does the writing."

The Pentagon benchmarks were established to prevent the military services from meeting quotas by accepting too many people with low IQs. "Yeah. Well that was before the people with high IQs decided they didn't want to get shot," Harvey explained.

Harvey denied that the Army was in the midst of a recruiting crisis, pointing to a series of new initiatives — including increasing the Army's advertising budget by $130 million and putting 3,000 more recruiters on the streets — that he hoped would reverse the downward trend. "We're going to have more recruiters buying more kids more beers than ever before," Harvey said. "If we could just get a couple of state legislatures to go back to the eighteen year old drinking laws, we'd have this shortage turned around in no time."