Sunday, January 31, 2010

Still nada

As much as I want to write more on this blog, there's just not much to talk about in its primary subject matter. Military recruiting is rolling hard and heavy and meeting mission early in the month. The recruiters I meet nowadays are chilling (relativly speaking). Command emphasis on work hours and time with family is being encouraged and enforced. Just the other day I ran into a recruiter who was taking a FS Loss for an OCS contract. No biggie. He had two more waiting in the wings for the next board and his company was already boxed on special missions for the quarter.

From what I can tell the biggest... event... in the military recruiting world was the pending termination of the MAVNI program.

I know. Huge deal huh?

Basically it was the program that allowed critical skill immigrants to enlist w/ less than an I-551 card. In the course of less than a year and, according to the Pentagon, at a cost of a couple of Pentagon-Level staff pogues it resulted in over 1,100 people joining the military, mostly the Army, possessing critical language, or some other, skill. With a waiting list probably twice that. It looks to be like allowing CAT IVs, except they're people who are skilled.

Continuation of the program is suspended pending a mandatory review by the Pentagon, which they haven't done. Speculation about why it has... stalled... is because of the events at Ft. Hood.

I know, I know, MAJ Hasan was a Muslim. And because of that "foreignness" we need to be super-duper careful about allowing other foreigners into the service. Except that MAJ Hasan wasn't some strange foreigner who snuck in. He was a long-serving member of the Army. He had provided giant, glaring, shining warning signs of "Holy crap this guy has problems", and, in all likelihood, needed to no longer be in the service. So, while some portion of the establishment tries to obscure seemingly important details about a tragic event, another portion of the establishment tries to let that tragedy stop what has been a successful way of improving readiness and capabilities.

Oh... in a funny bit... there was an incident not too long ago involving a Soldier in the area and his recruiter doing a bit of (suspected) dirty tricks to switch components. Using a (probably) bogus discharge document a Soldier switched components and had a recruiter enlist him. A few days later he's kicked out of the gaining component when his background check comes back and he's got a whole string of undisclosed non-waiverable law violations. Yes. Other recruiters' misery still makes me feel better.

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