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Military Recruitment II

20 Feb 2008 11:04 am

[Patrick Appel] A reader points out something that I had missed earlier:

Your comments and the associated article on "officers' feelings on how to improve recruitment" will leave a lot of people with a heavily distorted impression. The data from the survey clearly shows that it was heavily skewed towards a much older pool of retired officers: - 89% of respondents are over 50. 72% are over 60. 38% are over 70. - 92% are retired. 71% have been retired for more than 10 years.

If we were to try and define a typical respondent, he would be a 65 year old former colonel who entered service in the late 1960's and retired in the 1990s. Hardly representative of today's officer corps.

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