Not All It Can Be

THE U.S. MILITARY, like the lead in the movie "Stripes," is now perceived to be a "lean, mean fighting machine." Enlistment is up, America has forgotten Vietnam and analysts claim the military's prestige has been restored.

Never mind the record. Since Vietnam, U.S. military forces have only once been successfully deployed--in Grenada in 1983. And even that resort island was deemed to have presented such a challenge that 8612 medals were awarded to the 7000 Army soldiers involved.

In other action, the U.S. has crashed and burned in the desert (Iran, 1980), waited to be shelled and rammed by suicide trucks (Beirut, 1983), "advised" our allies with little result (El Salvador).

In other words, the Army's new prestige is entirely unwarranted. Evidently, though, the sort of person who volunteers to join the military is not the sort of person who goes to the library to look up the military's record. As Tom Lehrer '47 noted in jest two decades ago, "Not only does the military prohibit discrimination the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on the grounds of ability."

U.S. military planners have been trying for several years now to devise military equipment that can be operated with picture symbols. When and if they succeed, another milestone in nondiscrimination will have been passed--the literacy barrier. Try to ignore the preposterous image of an illiterate soldier poking his or her finger at a pretty, multicolored computer graphic to launch our country's most expensive high-tech armaments. Concentrate instead on the whole new class of desperately poor, conveniently patriotic citizens who could then be pronounced fit for service.

In the resurgence of patriotism that has accompanied President Reagan's tenure, the government would have us believe the military is attracting higher quality volunteers. Since more people are trying to enlist, the government can afford to be choosier. Vice President George Bush told the West Point graduating class on May 23, that numbers were up, standards were up, and the American soldier is once again "the best trained, best fed, best clothed and best equipped in the world.

BUT THIS argument is based on the assumption that the ratio of educated volunteers to total volunteers is a constant. It isn't. The Armed Forces may be attracting more volunteers, but it isn't necessarily attracting more, qualified volunteers. That's why there is continuing pressure to lower standards, to teach weapons to deal with illiterates rather than the other way around.

And you can't escape the feeling that the military powers-that-be somehow want stupid soldiers. Advertising "does focus on adventure training," says Richard Lane of the advertising and sales promotion office with the Boston recruiting battalion. "We've reached a real problem with the literacy rate of young Americans. We worry about the attention spans on 25-second [television] ads." One 1981 Army brochure touts the various branches of the service with full-color photos, drawings and watercolors. The accompanying text reads like a comic book.

Under the heading "Armor" was this classic paragraph: "Scout vehicles dart in, spot the enemy. Report, Call in the heavyweights. Tanks, Big Tanks. Up to 57 tons of steel and 750 horsepower come thundering in on each set of treads, Stop. Fire, Maneuver, Stand your ground, Slug it out, Mighty machines. But battles are won by men."

The U.S. Government Printing Office should be embarrassed to be publishing this drivel. But more importantly, so should the military. Some top brass must have approved this brochure, calculating that the sort of person to fall for the pitch would be useful in the Army.

Maybe macho types actually do make better soldiers. Maybe military contractors have a vested interest in high-tech, user-friendly hardware. But it's by no means clear that the Army is "all that it can be." At the very least the U.S. military can make a more plausible pitch to the post-comic books set.