Why The Army Wants To Ban Tattoos

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/09/25/why-the-army-wants-to-ban-tattooos/

Why The Army Wants To Ban Tattoos
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on September 25, 2013 at 12:57 PM

~snip~

But there’s method to the Army’s madness. This is just one small step in the service’s campaign to raise standards and discipline after it opened the floodgates to felons, high school dropouts, and other dubious recruits when it boosted its ranks at the height of the Iraq war.

Current regulations ban tattoos only on the face unless they’re “extremist, indecent, sexist or racist”: no swastikas or naked ladies, sorry, but almost anything else goes. On Saturday, however, Sergeant Major of the Army Raymond Chandler told troops in Afghanistan that the service was about to ban them on the neck, below the elbows, or below the knees. The ban means, in essence, no tattoos anywhere they’d be visible on a soldier wearing short sleeves and shorts. The service may well let some soldiers already in uniform keep their ink, but new recruits may have to pay out of their own pockets to get offending tattoos removed.

Why should ink disqualify you from being a soldier? “Is being willing to die for your country not good enough?” the commentator on the video asks (fast-forward to 0:45). “Does the military just have a surplus of people sitting around that they can be this choosey?”

Well, actually, it does. Between the end of the Iraq war, the drawdown in Afghanistan, and tightening budgets, the military can’t afford all the people it has, let alone the ships, planes, and main battle tanks. In fact, if the ongoing automatic spending cuts called sequestration continue for 10 years, as current law mandates, then the US will not have the firepower to defeat a single major enemy, e.g. North Korea, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force told Congress last week. (The Commandant of the Marine Corps was predictably more gung-ho).

[gopiscrap]

1. Interesting

[Drale]

2. "Military can’t afford all the people it has, let alone the ships, planes, and main battle tanks"

Well that's complete and utter bullshit, the Military can't afford something? I don't think so

[Aristus]

3. I agree. I lot of pearl-clutching from people we don't normally consider pearl-clutchers.

"Can't afford" almost certainly means: "Unable to fight a World War II-level conflict" with the typical American approach, which includes massive, wasteful, overwhelming firepower, ridiculous and expensive amenities like Burger King on every forward cantonment and firebase, 12 different patterns of camouflage uniforms, etc.

For all the screeching about inept overspending by the government, the vast majority of it is confined to our bloated, unwieldy military machine.

And for any "more-patriotic-than-thou" screechers out there, I'm a Gulf War vet and former M1A1 Abrams tank crewman, so save it...

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. We can't fight a WW2-level conflict anyway

We no longer have the basic manufacturing, the steel mills, foundries, shipyards, etc. Maybe we can buy enough raw steel from China.

[truebluegreen]

4. OT but "...the US will not have to firepower to defeat a single major enemy,

e.g. North Korea...."

North Korea is a major enemy? Compared to what? Grenada? Our military budget is currently around 700 Billion per year (not counting DoE or Veterans Affairs and who knows what else); NK's budget in 2011 was a third of their income or $8.77 billion for that year.

The MIC is just effing pathetic in its attempts to justify its black hole-level of appropriations.