Three-fourths of 17- to 24-year-olds today are not eligible to join the military

[hornetguy]

That's why ASSUMPTION was invented. If we just keep on asking questions, we won't be able to get nothing done. At a point, need to stop asking questions and starting acting on decisions made.

I spent half my time at RAND on projects and my dissertation determining what were valid assumptions and what were not valid assumptions. In the case of this article, EVERYTHING is an assumption beyond only 25% of 17-24 y/os are considered qualified to join the Army. So, then, what action or decision should we make based on this single statistic?

 

[Day-Tripper]

Average Recruit Circa 1943

Greetings!

The average US military recruit in 1943, having grown up during the Great Depression, probably suffered from malnutrition at one point or another.

He was likely to smoke unfiltered Lucky Strikes or Camels. Much more so than his peers in 2014.

He was more likely to have grown up in a tenement slum in New York or Chicago, or as a barefoot sharecropper's son from Alabama, or having worked for small wages in Kentucky coal mines or as a California migrant farm worker or Oregon timber workers.

He was often without a high school degree and lacked formal education. Many were immigrants, whose first language might not have been English.

But they seemed to do OK against the Japanese and Germans armies.

Basic training has a way of making the less-fit and less-able into lean, wiry combat infantrymen.

Regards,
Day-Tripper