From The S.F. Chronicle
By Nick Turse

After falling short of its goals last year, military recruiting in 2006 has been marked by upbeat pronouncements from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, claims of success by the White House, and a spate of recent press reports touting the military’s achievement of its woman- and manpower goals.

But the armed forces have met with success only through a fundamental transformation, and not the transformation of the military — that “co-evolution of concepts, processes, organizations and technology” that Rumsfeld is always talking about either.

While the secretary of defense’s longstanding goal of transforming the planet’s most powerful military into its highest-tech, most agile, most futuristic fighting force has, in the words of the Washington Post’s David VonDrehle, “melted away,” the very makeup of the armed forces has been mutating before our collective eyes under the pressure of the war in Iraq. This actual transformation has been reported, but only in scattered articles on the new recruitment landscape in America.

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