Quote Originally Posted by mercian billman
Wouldn't increasing salaries just continue to encourage more "poor" people
to enlist? Military salaries aren't great, but it does pay the bills and if your unmarried and have no children like most younger service members, it really isn't that bad.
It looks to me like most people are just using the military as a stepping stone, so if you want to enlist more people you either have to make the stepping stone better or make it possible or even desirable for people to have longer military careers.


It's not mostly poor people joining up either, there are people from poor backgrounds, but the majority would probably be considered working class or lower middle class.
Yes, that's what the "" were for, but reading these forums it seems like a lot of people are joing up to get a cheap trip through college. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but that won't convince people who can easily afford college as much.


If the US military wants to increase it's size we have to accept the fact that the "quality" of new enlistees will decrease. But that's okay, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out proper comm procedures and you definately don't need a clean police record to fire an M-16.
If you can keep the influx of people about the same and can retain more people, you will have a bigger army. Similarly, if you can get people who are interested in a military career but won't pursue because there's more money to be made in the private sector, to enroll because of increased wages, you get a bigger pool of candidates. There's no reason per se why the quality of recruits has to go down imo.