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“I do believe you can join the service with tattoos,” he says. “I’m sure you can join with a swastika. There’s a big gang problem in the armed forces right now: if you went to a recruitment station with a swastika I don’t think they would stop you, it would be noted in your record.”

Maybe the constant media abuse about his meager intellect made George W. Bush soft in the heart as well as the head. During the ‘war on terror’ the U.S. military have opened their hearts to high-school dropouts and the intellectually challenged

Although this is a new departure for the U.S. military in fact there are a number of other nations who recruit foreign citizens: In France, for example, the Foreign Legion relies on about 8,000 non-citizens. But how it will affect the U.S. armed forces is still being played out

Gang-bangers know a lot about war – it’s their raison d’être. But until the ‘war on terror’ that expertise had never wholesale shifted from the inner city to the U.S. military, from South Central to Baghdad

The twin vices of drug addiction and alcoholism were rampant in the U.S. military during the Vietnam war and through movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon became the emblematic image of the armed forces during that war. But figures shows that by the end 2005, of the 104,000 who had sought medical help after serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 32,010 were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, drug addiction or alcoholism. Proportionally, that’s three times as many as those who returned from Vietnam

Clint Eastwood looked poised on screen with a gun in his hand even as his hair grayed and his skin wrinkled, but it is unclear if that can be duplicated in real life combat, although the U.S. military is giving it a try. During the ‘war on terror’ it raised the traditional age limit for new recruits from 35 to 42 to give grandpa a chance to stop telling his Gulf War I stories to the grandkids and go to join Gulf War II

Carter F. Smith is a former military investigator who worked with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command from 2004 to 2006, when he helped to root out gang violence in troops. “When you need more soldiers, you lower the standards, whether you say so or not,” he says. “The increase in gangs and extremists is an indicator of this.” Military investigators may be concerned about white supremacists, he says. “But they have a war to fight, and they don’t have incentive to slow down.”

Andrew Wheatley

Lynn McAfee, of the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, is ecstatic. “I think it’s great that they finally understand our value in society,” she said. “Now they finally understand that everyone can play a part in defending our country.”

The Army’s top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, does not mince his words when discussing why the US military has taken such a disturbing attitude to mental illness. “The challenge for us,” he said, “is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge. And so we have to weigh the needs of the mission, with the soldiers’ personal needs.”

Since the War on Terror the number of “moral waivers” given to individuals with a criminal record has skyrocketed. In 2007, the Army admitted about 25% more recruits who had a history of legal problems, which ranged from felony convictions to drugs offences. From 2006 to 2007 the number of “moral waivers” granted to the Army went up from 8,129 to 10,258; the Marine Corp in the same period saw an increase from 16,969 to 17,413.

Looking at he number of discharges of gay servicemembers, it is clear that the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy didn’t change much, it took the chronic troop shortages to really open the floodgates for gay civil rights. In 2001, 640 soldiers were discharged for homosexuality. By 2006, the number dropped to 282 – a 56 percent reduction