Our Evaporating Army
Most reporting has focused on the problems of recruiting, which has fallen far short of goals over the past few months. Serious as it is, however, the recruiting shortfall could be only a temporary problem. If and when we get out of Iraq – I know, a big if and a big when – it shouldn't be too hard to find enough volunteers to maintain the Army's manpower.
Much more serious, because it would be irreversible, would be a mass exodus of mid-career military professionals. "That's essentially how we broke the professional Army we took into Vietnam," one officer told the National Journal. "At some point, people decided they could no longer weather the back-to-back deployments."
[Paul Krugman, "Too Few, Yet Too Many", The New York Times, 30 May 2005.]