The Associated Press’ disinformation operations against the US military continues:

The percent of Army recruits with a high school diploma dropped last year, continuing a trend that has worsened since the start of the Iraq war, according to a report released Tuesday.

National Priorities Project, a research group that analyzes federal data, found that nearly 71 percent of Army recruits graduated from high school in the 2007 budget year. It based its findings on data it obtained from the Defense Department through a Freedom of Information Act request.

All troops must have a high school diploma or an equivalent degree. The military prefers that they have a high school diploma because its studies have shown they are more likely to finish an enlistment term. Still, the Army has paid for some recruits to take GED preparation classes and take the test.

The Army’s goal is 90 percent high school graduates, which it hasn’t met since 2004. Each year since, the number of recruits with at least a high school diploma has steadily declined.

Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., acknowledged it has been a difficult recruiting environment. He said overall high school graduation rates are declining, which could be a factor.

Strained, in part, by military operations in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the military has had to increase the number of waivers and raise enlistment bonuses to fill its ranks. [Associated Press]

The claim that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the military accepting more recruits with GEDs is an assumption by the AP writer and not a fact which is something the writer does not make clear.  The Army recruiting spokesman told the writer the difficult recruiting environment had to do with the drop in graduation rates but some how the AP writer contributes it to the war on terror.

Why didn’t the AP writer disclose what the current high school graduation  rates are?  Could it be because it would sink his article because high school graduation rates are currently hovering around the 70% range, which is nearly identical to what the US military is allowing in?  It is a whole other topic, but I find our US graduation rate highly embarrassing and have heard our politicians say anything about what they are going to do to improve it.  Anyway, it seems like this is a highly pertinent fact that should be included in the article, but it wasn’t probably because it would ruin the AP writer’s narrative that war on terror is responsible for the decline.

Besides the decline in high school graduation rates the Army is going through a massive increase in soldiers:

Plans are to raise the number of active-duty Army, Army Guard and Army Reserve by 74,000 overall, with the active-duty force rising by 65,000 to a total of 547,000. In October, top Army leaders said they planned to move faster to expand the force by adding the full 74,000 soldiers by 2010, two years earlier than originally planned. [Stars & Stripes]

This increase is on top of the prior increases US military recruiters had to deal with in recent years.  It is extremely impressive that recruiters have been able to meet recruiting goals, but I predicted last year that recruiters will probably have a hard time meeting this latest increase in troops especially if the economy remains strong, which is another fact that was some how missing from the AP article.

Declining high school graduation rates, an expanding military, and a strong economy all have much more to do with the drop in high school graduates than blaming it on the war on terror, but obviously the AP could care less because the narrative of blaming it on the war on terror fits with their on going theme that the war on terror is breaking the military.

Finally, I just want to say I find it extremely snobby that because someone has a GED they are considered by the AP to be a poor recruit.  I know plenty of soldiers with GEDs that were much better soldiers than soldier that I had that had college degrees much less a high school diploma.  I am a big believer that we as a nation should give everyone the maximum opportunity to serve their country.  Once they are in the military and they can’t cut it, it is easy enough to chapter them and separate them which I have had to do to plenty of soldiers before who had high school degrees as well as GEDs.  The point is that soldiers are something that needs to be judged on case by case basis and not with sweeping generalizations that an agenda driven media likes to bestow upon them.