Military standards

The article I'm linking you to here is called Voice of the White House and it's written anonymously by someone who is supposedly a White House staffer. Whether he or she is inside the White House or that is just a literary device for writing opinion pieces, the following observation is true enough:

And the U.S. military is in a sorry mess now. They have lost at least ten thousand dead and over twenty five thousand seriously enough wounded to preclude further participation in the anti-guerrilla campaign. They lust for a draft but that is not to be because the announcement of a general draft before the mid-term elections would be political suicide for the Republicans.

Instead of a draft, the Bush people have now so lowered the entrance standards for the military that a huge influx of juvenile delinquents, rabid racists, gang members, social misfits of every kind are swelling the ranks and we see the results in the sharp escalation of drug use, sexual violence, disobedience to authority and a serious morale problem with the relatively “normal” troops.

This is very worrying. I think it would be much better to have a draft than for standards to be lowered like this. We're supposed to have the best trained military in the world. That won't be true for long if we admit seriously disordered people to the ranks.